Towards a Literacy of Cooperation looks like a great course. It’s running at Stanford next semester, and for those of us who can’t get to California every Wednesday, an online component is promised via a wiki and a blog which will allow us to follow what they’re up to.

[F]or two centuries — a time during which the world passed from an agrarian landscape into a global post-industrial culture of unprecedented scale and complexity — science, society, public policy and commerce have attended almost exclusively to the role of competition. The stories people tell themselves about what is possible, the mythical narratives that organizations and societies depend upon, have been variations of “survival of the fittest.” The role of cooperation has been largely unmapped.

Lecturers include Howard Rheingold, Andrea Saveri (from the Future Institute), Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and several others.