To Learn more about Wiki or Help with Wiki, please look at online documentation or email moc.nabirs|avatsavirs.lina#moc.nabirs|avatsavirs.lina. Wiki is a very powerful and appropriate tool for a collaborative narrative. I don't know it well enough but I am hoping that we will all learn in the process of writing The Cendit Story.
The purpose of this Wiki is to write The Cendit Story in a collaborative and participatory way. There are many and separate stories that we can tell from each of our vantage points. To my way of thinking, together and separately, they tell the story of good work and people who grew out of that work.
Cendit (Centre for Development of Instructional Technology) was ahead of its time. Innovation was a bad habit and, not knowing any better, we did what came naturally to us. Often we imagined things that did not exist and like Don Quixote we charged at windmills. At Stanford they now teach Don Quixote's Lessons for Leadership.
To this day, I vividly recall the sketch Rajive drew on the board of Cendit. He said, Cendit was like a sail boat on the sea. Its eventual direction will be the vector of several factor: the wind, the current, the many hands on rudder.
Let us try to retrieve some important artifacts to share with others who were not part of our work together. I often get tempted to talk about Cendit because there is a lot of pioneering work that took place in those 34 years (1972-2006). I hope someday I can say it's all there on the web. Recently Amitanshu Das wrote about the need for "…a book or a film and a website about Cendit (or all three) and create products and media that clearly articulate Cendit's history, it's influences and lessons learned". The Cendit Story wiki began with a chance conversation between Subha. Sunita came up with the idea of doing it as a free Wiki. We all felt it was worthwhile recalling the story that was a big part of our lives. It changed us, maybe in retelling we will learn more about ourselves, and those who will read may discover something relevant and of use to them.
Please free to change anything that you find here, with humility and without ego. What all of us who were part of Cendit at one time or the other achieved a lot, things that have changed the world in small ways, often we started things that others did better.
Let The Cendit Story be the example of "never ascending, ever widening" narrative. Gandhi's words that I often quoted. Each one adding to it, helping with others have written, sometime correcting, sometimes changing, but always with the purpose of learning from the shared life and experience.
I don't know everybody who worked with Cendit. Cendit existed for two decades after me. Please ask others you know to join in this collective narartive. Over the years, till Rajive decided to put an end to Cendit in early 2000, many people worked with Cendit. It shaped many of us and Cendit alumni and interns are today all over the world.
Since the story of Cendit is entwined with the story of my life, do not hesitate to dip into my wiki to take material to use here, that is, if any of it is useful. I would prefer if I was able to borrow from The Cendit Story for my wiki.
Anil Srivastava
Gaithersburg, Maryland, 8th March 2012
