Education Week is running a story titled “Educators Experiment With Student-Written ‘Wikis’: Malleable, Open-ended Web Sites Seen as Aids to Collaborative Learning” that highlights some of the work being done by the likes of Tim Lauer, Paul Allison and others. Here’s a snip that I thought was pretty interesting:

“You can�t do the cookie-cutter essay anymore, because it won�t make sense,” Mr. Allison said.

Many students have taken to using his collaborative-writing wiki, which can be used for expository writing as well more-creative compositions. For instance, on the �discussion� page of the school�s wiki on “Macbeth,” students wrote 20 adaptations of the play’s opening scene, in which three witches in a forest conspire on a coming battle.

In Shakespeare’s version, the first witch says, “When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” The second witch replies: “When the hurlyburly’s done/When the battle’s lost and won.”

One student rewrote that exchange this way: “Yo, where we gonna meet at?/In the [sic] Japan, Tokyo, or Mega world?” The second character replies: “When the grasshopper is finished/And the battle is lost or won.”

So many interesting ideas…
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(Via cogdogblog) Since I got tagged as a huckster the last time I floated an interesting use of one of these tools in the classroom, let me state clearly that I offer these up simply to get people thinking about what can be done. Sometimes I get a bit too excited about the possibilities. So sue me.

Here’s a wiki that’s being put to good use by a track and field team in Deer Valley, CO. Here’s the rationale:

Making our website a wiki makes it easier for us to keep it up-to-date. And a wiki is perfect for a track team since we have so many coaches working in the many track & field events. We can all up date when we feel like it.

Seems so, I don’t know, logical somehow. And I have to say that pbwiki (which is where I’ve been creating most of my wikis lately) is really doing some neat things to help make wiki sites prettier too. (Uh-oh…was that hucksterism?)

And speaking of wikis, have you been to Wikiville lately? More and more kids from around the world are adding information about their places. It’s one way that you might want to think about introducing your students to wikis. (How was that, Tom?)

Just an update on Wikiville: I’ve tracked a couple hundred changes in the last few days. Very cool. And now if you want to know more about Camilla, Georgia from student’s point of view, you can. (I love the description of how to dress at school…)

So what are you waiting for? What’s your place like?
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Just in case you might be interested to see what a bunch of U.K. students working on wikis look like, I just posted a slew of pictures at Flickr. There’s also one of a funny looking car.
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I’ll be travelling a bit the next week, heading to Savannah, Georgia for a Saturday blog building workshop and then on Sunday to Bolton, U.K., just outside of Manchester to work on a very cool wiki project with 50 area students. Wikiville is the brainchild of John Bidder, and the idea is that eventually the site will become a place where students from around the world will be able to add stories and essays about the places they live. (Nothing like a big idea.) We’re also thinking that they could add links to multimedia as well, creating a rich resource that would serve as a potential connecting point for all sorts of creative work.

The 50 students who we’ll be working with next week will be there to brainstorm ideas, learn how to add content, develop the ethical guidelines for use, figure out the logistics of editing and whatever else we can cram into the time. We’re hoping they can offer ideas on how to market it to other students and make it grow. I can’t wait to see what comes of it.

So I’d love to hear any ideas you might have about how this might work. And if you’d like to participate when we get it up and running let me know. The idea that there are some teachers and classes out there ready to add some content could be pretty motivational to the group we’re starting with.

(Cross posted at ETI) It seems more and more mainstream media outlets are turning to Wikipedia as a trusted source. Take this article in today’s Washington Post, for example:

At the start of the season 30 ethnic Samoans were in NFL training camps and according to Wikipedia, the web based encyclopedia, it has been estimated that a Samoan male (either an American Samoan, or a Samoan living in the 50 United States) is 40 times more likely to play in the NFL than a non-Samoan American.

Hmmm…interesting. I think.

But isn’t that a really strange stat to have crop up in Wikipedia? So I did a little more digging. (I have no life.) That interesting little tidbit was added to Wikipedia on November 29, 2003 by someone going by the name of Dale Arnett who most recently has been working on (just today in fact) the Ric Flair entry, by the way. (For the uninitiated, he’s a professional wrestler.) And what do we know about Dale?

I spent a good chunk of my childhood in Chicagoland, both in the city of Chicago and in Berwyn, but I spent my teenage years in Paducah. After a convoluted path from my bachelor’s to my master’s degree, and an excruciating job search, I started working for Union Carbide in South Charleston, West Virginia (living in Dunbar) in 1990. I got “Dow-sized” in 2002, as I was one of the many people let go not long after Dow bought Union Carbide in 2001. After about a year working for a Dow contractor doing much the same work I had been doing, I wound up in law school.

I’m planning to take the Kentucky bar in July 2006.

Hmmm…interesting. I think.

So here’s the question. Do you think the Post reporter knows that he’s included information that is over 2.5 years old and that was contributed by a guy who has created Wikipedia articles on everything from Xenia Onatopp to Chik-fil-A to Kentucky State Highway 3005?

And the even bigger question…should WE care?

Welcome to the crazy world of socially constructed knowledge…

Tags: wikipedia,, literacy

One more quick wiki post before moving on to something else. Danah Boyd has what I think is the most articulate defense of Wikipedia yet. Here’s a snip:

I will be truly sad if academics don’t support the project, don’t contribute knowledge. I will be outraged if academics continue to talk about having Wikipedia eliminated as a tool for information dispersal. Sure, students shouldn’t be citing from Wikipedia instead of the primary texts they were supposed to have read. But Wikipedia is a stunning supplement to most texts and often provides pointers to other relevant material that one didn’t know existed. We should be teaching our students how to interpret the materials they get on the web, not banning them from it. We should be correcting inaccuracies that we find rather than protesting the system. We have the knowledge to be able to do this, but all too often, we’re acting like elitist children. In this way, i believe academics are more likely to lose credibility than Wikipedia.

As always, read the whole thing.

In case you didn’t see it, The Journal Nature compared 42 entries in Wikipedia to the same 42 entries in Britannica and found the each had four major mistakes, and that on average Britannica had three minor errors in each entry compared to four in Wikipedia. Now, from where I sit, despite the somewhat more awkward and less polished writing, the up to date-ness of Wikipedia is worth the chance of one additional minor error, especially since we’re supposed to be checking all this stuff ourselves anyway, right?
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Very few educators are doing more with wikis in the classroom than Paul Allison. (I think I’ve said that before.) While it hasn’t all been smooth sailing of late (see this post about some recent issues that have cropped up), Paul’s work is worth watching carefully because it’s really showing us what the potential is in a very transparent, honest way.

Case in point: his recent post titled “High School Students (and Teachers) Write Collaboratively on a Wiki“. It’s a major deconstruction (with accompanying screencast!) on one wiki article on “Latino Pride” that was created and edited by his 9th grade students. Here’s the type of detail you get:

Before the article gets to were we find it today, there are a few more interesting changes.

4161: One day, Andrew, a student who had just finished a study of Puerto Rican Independence movements, added a single phrase to section 4.2.

4167: Toward the middle of April, Emily adds her feelings. She hates people who make differences matter.

4171: Emily adds a paragraph to the “Joking comes back to you” section that Anthony had started almost a month earlier.

4178: Chasterie also adds her message about unity, including text, and image, and a new heading.

Really good stuff for anyone who wants to get a handle on what this might look like.

And Paul’s been doing interesting things on his blog of late, including a recent “jogcast” that he recorded while running along the Hudson River. If you want a sense of all the really innovative things he’s doing, listen to Part 3 of his jogcast.
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I was mulling over a response to the response to the latest Wikipedia ugliness, but now I don’t have to, thanks to Alan.

I am tired of the WikiPedia flogging going on- yes the issue is worth discourse, but it seems to be the only conversation now, and what is being lost in the wash, is the un-heralded, social software fueled human explosion that pushed WikiPedia out there, that created an explosion of information. So is only important thing to be “right”, “factual”, “trusted” as opposed to having a voice in the conversation?

The whole current discussion seems flawed in being polarized; it seems unwise to gloss glowingly on WikiPedia without acknowledging the flaws and inherent issues of mass written content, but it also seems unwise to dismiss the whole process because a smaller number of &$^%ing idiots are pissing in the well.

Can I get an “Amen?”

News is not good on the Wikipedia front. (Please, someone stop me if I start using battle metaphors to often around here…) Adam Curry has been doing some self-aggrandizing in terms of his Podfathership, and now there has been some character assisination going on that has really accentuated the Wikipedia problem. Because, you see, there are now a couple of seemingly reputable reference sites on the Internet that are snatching Wikipedia text verbatim (without human eyes) to answer questions people pose.

Oh boy.

Dave Winer says:

…the bigger problem is that Wikipedia is so often considered authoritative. That must stop now, surely. Every fact in there must be considered partisan, written by someone with a confict of interest. Further, we need to determine what authority means in the age of Internet scholarship. And we need to take a step back and ask if we really want the participants in history to write and rewrite the history. Isn’t there a place in this century for historians, non-participants who observe and report on the events?

That is the critical question. What does authority mean in the age of Internet scholarship? (I just want to ask questions today, not attempt to answer them. I’m tired.)

And so the disruption goes…

UPDATE: See this NY Times Lesson Plan on the Wikipedia woes.

I got an e-mail pointing to this post at if:Book that asks “Can there be great textbooks without great authors?” The basic premise is that the movement to create collaborative texts a la Wikibooks will never produce the quality required to truly replace traditionally authored texts.

The open source volunteer format works for encyclopedia entries, which don’t require deep knowledge of a particular subject. But the sustained examination and comprehensive vision required to understand and contextualize a particular subject area is out of reach for most wiki contributors. The communal voice of the open source textbook is also problematic, as it lacks the power of an inspired authoritative narrator.

The post goes on to discuss a portion of the Wikibook Art History that was obviously plagiarized from a very widely circulated art history text.

If the first page of the wikibook-of-the month blatantly rips-off one of the most popular art history books in print and nobody notices, how will Wikibooks be able to police the other 11,000 plus textbooks it intends to sponsor? Finally, what will the consequences be if poorly written, plagairized, open-source textbooks become the runaway hit that Wikibooks predicts?

Oy. It’s getting harder and harder, isn’t it? Which is why we have to work harder and harder to get our brains around these issues and figure out how to counsel and teach or students. And I’m struggling here.

On the one hand, I agree that the voice of one author will usually be more coherent and powerful than the combined voice of hundreds or thousands. On the other hand, the knowledge that hundreds or thousands can contribute to the text will usually be more all encompasing than the knowledge of one. On the one hand, it’s going to really stink if collaborative texts are just amalgamated rip offs of existing texts without attribution. On the other hand, if we’re good at teaching responsible research and attribution, that’s an easy problem to fix. On the one hand, however, it will be tempting to appropriate large chunks of copyrighted material, paraphrased and attributed as it might be. On the other hand, if we take the time to understand and teach Fair Use, and if we do the work necessary to interview and research our own sources (and teach our students that process), we can, I think, create something of value. And while it might not compare in terms of eloquence and cogency, what it represents in terms of an exercise in the collaborative attempt to negotiate truth and meaning may be worth even more.

Look, even the most eloquent texts can be a) wrong, b) irrelevant or c) outdated. None, I would guess, are perfect. Would Wikibooks be less perfect? Probably. But could we live with that, and as a part of our practice, could we teach our students the skills necessary to move those texts closer to perfection? Somehow that makes more sense to me these days.

But there’s no doubt, this is all more work for all of us.