XplanaZine

Teachers are always in a hurry - and ready to make compromises based on that. If you need a handout for your 3 o’clock class, and it is already 2:45, you might have time to spellcheck the document, but you won’t necessarily have time to read it out loud to make sure that you find the miss steaks that thee spellchecker cant sea. And if you publish that handout on the Internet, to make it available to the students who miss class, the handout will indeed be available for them - miss steaks and all.
Obviously, the scholarly publishing process works rather differently. It is driven by pressures of punctiliousness rather than the start of class fifteen minutes from now. The author is given ample opportunity to correct mistakes, a copy editor may be involved, and then there are the proofs prior to publication (and perhaps a proofreader, in addition to the copy editor). The presence of typographical errors is grounds for suspicion as to the scholarly quality of the project as a whole (indeed, the Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews, a great online service, will regularly include a recitation of the typographical errors found in a book, with a judgment as to their seriousness, e.g. “Within the first few pages — and of course elsewhere — I observed a number of typographical lapses, none really serious, but all at least vaguely disturbing.”)
Now the process of publishing on the Internet is often one of haste, producing all sorts of errors. On the other hand, the Internet has the virtue of making it easy to correct those errors just as quickly; you don’t have to wait for the coming of the second edition (and you don’t have to worry about all those first editions still inhabiting the bookshelves of the world). In my online courses, I give my students extra credit for pointing out typographical errors on the course webpages. This turns out to be a veritable bonanza for some students - and they take good advantage of it. The students read closely, and I get to clean up my webpages.
Now you might think that Blackboard, as an online course management system, would offer at least some kind of online document editing, so that you could quickly and easily correct any mistakes that you, or your students, might notice in the course documents you have published there. Alas, not so. Blackboard lets you upload documents to your heart’s content, but if offers no online document editing. So if you find a mistake in one of the course documents you have uploaded to Blackboard, you must first edit your document, then remove the document you previously uploaded, and then upload the new version of the document - Blackboard will not even just let you upload a new version of the document with the same name that could overwrite the erroneous version! Blackboard thus provides a built-in disincentive for instructors to correct mistakes that they notice in their handouts after the fact. Remember: teachers are always in a hurry.
Online content management systems know better. The new Knowledge Base that we are using here for IT customer self-service here at OU - a product by Attenza, which is now part of Skywire software - has a great feature that makes it very easy for users to submit error reports about a given article, and very easy for system editors to correct those errors. Whenever an article from the Knowledge Base is displayed publicly, there is a button at the top of the screen that says Comment on This Article. When the user clicks on the button, a tiny window opens up which allows them to type their comments. These comments are then “attached” to the article - the Knowledge Base editors can view a list of all the comments submitted by users, and whenever they are editing an individual article in the Knowledge Base they can access any customer comments submitted about that article. I know it sounds like a small thing - but it is enormously useful. We are trying to get all our own staff who view articles online to do a bit of proofreading, and then with just a couple of keystrokes make a note of any typographical errors that they find by using this simple feature. Obviously a typo is probably not worth an email or picking up the phone to call someone about the mistake - so Attenza has given us a solution that perfectly suits the scale of the problem. I wonder how many Knowledge Base and Content Management systems have a feature like this? I can vouch for its incredible usefulness in our work trying to manage a pretty ragtag Knowledge Base here at OU.
On a larger scale, take a look at the great Distributed Proofreaders, part of Project Gutenberg. The site provides an hourly page count of this gigantic collective effort:

Hourly Page Count:
Pages completed today: 2621 as of 21:01 Pacific Time today
Pages completed this month: 11394
Our goal this month is 134,008 pages which means 4,786 pages per day.
And everyone has something to contribute… each text goes through two rounds of proofreading, and “newbies” are invited to do proofreading as part of the first round. What’s available in the first round right now? Spalding’s Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1894… The Güegüence; A Comedy Ballet in the Nahuatl-Spanish Dialect of Nicaragua … Memoirs of Aaron Burr … Complete Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge … and, much to my delight: The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa! There is currently no English translation of the Mahabharata, the enormous (and enormously beautiful) national epic of India, available online. But there will be when this project is done! They say that anybody who hears a recitation of the Mahabharata from start to finish will achieve heavenly transcendence. So reading this text out loud as I proofread puts me closer and closer to heaven, one page at a time.
The Internet may get us into trouble by letting us publish in haste, but it also lets us repent… and proofread… at leisure.