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Boccaccio’s Decameron is one of the most ancient storytelling where social and cultural values are shared in a collaborative way. 100 stories, shared in 10 days by 10 young people as a mean to mentally escape the horrors of the Black Death in Italy.

                     La gente è più acconcia a credere il male che il bene.

                     People are more inclined to believe in bad intentions than in good ones.

                     Third Day, Sixth Story

The Decameron Web, developed by the Italian Studies Department at Brown University, tries to revive learning in a collaborative and pleasurable style but still with an educational purpose in mind. The site is a platform where literary discussion about the context of the Decameron and Boccaccio takes place. Students and scholars can send their own work as well as using the resources available on the web. In this way students can learn from scholars by either observing or participating with small contributions of their own.

As Brown and Adler indicate in their article “Minds on Fire”, The Decameron Web is a project where “community is added to content”, where learning about and learning to be is combined in the new social learning of Learning 2.0 which creates a “participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners”.

The importance of the Decameron Web is the provision not only of educational content but also of a community (a community of students and scholars). The Decameron Web is full of source materials, annotations, bibliographies, essays and audio/visual materials on the work and content on the literary, historical and cultural context of the Decameron. The site clearly represents an open source communities sharing Open Educational Resources.

The web is still open and fully functional. I have tried to research related topics but all my searches take me to the articles about the Decameron and its impact and interpretation as an extraordinary piece of literary work. With regard to the Decameron Web the majority of my searches make reference to John S. Brown lectures about social learning.

https://search.library.wisc.edu/database/UWI12248

http://italianartsociety.org/faqs/decameron-web/

http://mdr-maa.org/resource/decameron-web/