Template:The deal

Here's the deal!

Volunteers build A Place to Study to provide cultural resources to persons seeking self-formation and liberal learning in the digital commons. It's all free, unencumbered, and as comprehensive as we can make it. To help you feel at home, here's a tip about how things work.

In going around A Place to Study, we encounter two types of web pages, which tightly connect together. We visit the first as a place, and we interact with the second to study.

A place page works very much like an actual place, it has a location and fits into the overall topography of A Place to Study. It's substantially substantive and relatively unchanging over time. As A Place to Study builds up we aspire to develop a range of place pages to represent the fullness of human culture. We get around A Place to Study by moving from place to place using the links interconnecting the place pages. In doing so, each of us will have subjective, personal experience in the place — our unique perceptions, interests, observations, activities, and reflections, just as we do in moving through other places in the course of life. That's where the study pages come in.

One or more study pages attach inseparably to each place page to which they link. Of course, as in the rest of life, we can just move on from place to place, going about our business. But with every place, the study paged invite us to actively express our thoughtful reflections, which will differ, depending on how each reacts to the place. All of us visiting "A Place" can activate the associated study page and formulate and express our thoughts and feelings in response on it. That's study — the intentional effort to formulate and express what we have to say and do in our experiential course of life. By inviting such study, A Place to Study becomes fully participatory, and we all can engage in the work of self-formation and liberal learning, contributing our efforts to the digital commons.

All visitors, respecting the intentions embodied in A Place to Study, can freely contribute their thoughts, reflections, and ideas by activating a "to Study" link, and to the "Add comment" boxes at the bottom of "A Place" pages. Visitors who want to do more that — add new places, new cultural resources, and use capacities as "residents" on A Place to Study to cultivate a distinctive persona here — can do so by requesting accounts. Residents have domiciles, User pages, and the capability to start new pages and engage in the overall editorial and curatorial work that will sustain A Place to Study vibrantly.

In this way, all of us can freely participate in the work of A Place to Study. It's like a city, where persons both visit and live to engage in the cultural life we all share.