Tony650 writes:
Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember it being declared a spectacular failure.
In retrospect it is obvious that Bootcamp could only have worked if the inmates recognized that they were miscreants in need of rehabilitation. The reality is that they perceived themselves as the victims of an overzealous and biased moderator force.
Teachers and professors around the world can tell you of the difficulties presented by a student who thinks they know as much or more than them. Until such students realize that's not the case they will learn nothing, and they will be an obstacle to other's learning because they disrupt the class.
EvC Forum is not a classroom, but it often hosts people who not only don't know much, they aren't even aware of it. It would be nice to be able to provide a forum where such people could be brought up to speed, but there are two significant obstacles. The first was already mentioned - few people believe they're in need of any remediation.
The second is the nature of the medium - I've come to the conclusion that a discussion board is a poor educational medium. There are many great websites where you can learn a lot, but the discussion board format faces certain drawbacks. Where there are many informative posts here of very high quality, there's also a lot of noise. Let's face it, even textbooks and educational websites take considerable effort to learn from, so it's not hard to see why a discussion board dialogue would face severe difficulties in this regard.
Naturally we're still always looking for new ideas for improvements.
--Percy