Inverted Hollywood: The Pitch for e-Knowledge

Abstract

To open this article, I begin with a confession. While I have learned enormously from research articles and scholarly texts, I have also learned a lot from movies. Like most typical pre-service teachers, when I entered my teacher education program, I had ingested more celluloid than I had academic articles. To frame this chapter, I am going to fuse the theme of increasing the use of online resources in teacher education with movie making: I am going to give you a movie pitch for the Public Knowledge Project - The First Installment. I am intentionally choosing a movie pitch script for this chapter to illustrate several points. Not the least of which is that scholarly communication in general (through online or any means) has a problem of Inverted Hollywood. Scholars or academics have wonderfully substantial content to deliver but we often lack the means to motivate users to visit our web sites and to read our articles. Hollywood, on the other hand, can motivate high interest amongst the public but can rarely deliver any substantial content (Norman, 1993, p.5). In this chapter, I intend to make the analysis of the Public Knowledge Project more 'Hollywood' and, in the process, hopefully motivate a few readers to visit the Public Knowledge Project website