May 2009

RTC to Bridge Past, Present, and Future in New Wiki-Based History Project

This week, the Institute’s Research and Training Center on Community Living (RTC) and The MENTOR Network Charitable Foundation launch an innovative project that uses today’s technology to preserve and share the history of leadership in the developmental disabilities field with new generations of leaders. The project – “The History of Leadership in Developmental Disabilities: A Wiki Project” – will create a history of the role of leadership and leaders in generating the ideas, movements, and programs that have been foundational to the developmental disabilities field over the past 150 years. Using Wiki technology, it will engage current leaders in contributing to the multimedia content of the online history resource as a means to bridge the generational gap between those who taught and inspired the current leaders and those who will move into leadership roles in the future. This opportunity has some urgency as many older leaders are reaching retirement age and beyond, and the information, insight, and resources they possess are an important legacy for future generations.

This project grew out of a two-hour multimedia history lesson created for the Leadership Seminar of the National Leadership Consortium on Developmental Disabilities at the University of Delaware. The lesson, which is the basis for the new project, profiles the experiences of key leaders over the past 150 years, and the key ideas and lessons from their leadership, as well as other events, places, and individuals that contributed in both positive and negative ways to current knowledge, beliefs, and responses to disability. Following that initial presentation, numerous requests were received to make the history lesson available to a broader audience as Web-based content. But such an approach seemed too restricted. Thanks to the sponsorship of The MENTOR Network Charitable Foundation, the initial lesson will hopefully be just the beginning to an expanded resource that documents the history of people, ideas, and events that have shaped the developmental disabilities field.

The project will use a moderated Wiki approach in which contributors can submit content electronically (text, photos, video, audio), and the submissions will then be reviewed for appropriateness before being added to the site. “We envision this Wiki as a tree,” says Charlie Lakin, RTC Director. “The initial course may be the trunk, but to make it a tree we need branches, and branches off of those branches. We hope that many of the established leaders and historians of our field will find this Wiki site a valuable multi-media repository through which to share with future leaders the personalities, ideas, and lessons that have shaped our field to date. Hopefully, by passing on the story of how we got to where we are, future leaders will be better aided to guide the continued evolution of the field.”

In the first phase of the project, the initial history lesson will be prepared for Web presentation, a database will be created, an authoring template will be designed, and expectations for submissions will be developed. When these steps are accomplished, a formal solicitation of material will be made to the field.

FFI on the project, contact Charlie at lakin001@umn.edu, 612-624-5005 or Jerry Smith at smith495@umn.edu, 612-624-4336.