Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

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"I'll Take Poor Assumptions for $800, Alex"

December 2, 2007 By Will Richardson

So I’m looking at pretty bleak odds right now in terms of getting home from beautiful Monterey (where I got the experience of presenting on the TED stage even though it wan’t the TED conference) because there is this big blob of icy snow blue over New Jersey on the weather maps today. But this article about a Boston College professor who is using wikis to have students create the text for his course lifted my spirits a bit. Lots of shifts:

“My wiki is my textbook now,” he said. “This platform is infinitely better and gets better information from a variety of sources. It takes a year and half for a textbook to get published, and by the time that happens it is outdated. [The use of] textbooks will begin to fade … and these more collaborative-based, environment will probably rise to the surface.”

But here is the chuckle. In the comments on the story, we quickly get the typical skeptic:

What exactly are the students (or their parents) paying for, and what exactly do the students know at the end of the course that they didn’t know before? Or does everybody just get a nice fuzzy feeling because they create their own exams and determine their own grades? And how many credits do they get for this waste of time and money?

And, in an example of what fun all of this is, a student from the class gives a great response starting with “I’ll take poor assumptions for $800, Alex”. Nice.

Maybe my assumptions about the weather are wrong too…

Technorati Tags: wikis classroom education shifts

Filed Under: Wiki Watch

On Wikipedia Discussions

August 16, 2007 By Will Richardson

Talk:Debate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaA nice column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by Lee Gomes that rightly points out that the best part of Wikipedia are the discussions that occur behind the entries themselves. This is my experience too, these days:

Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive experience—so much so that it’s become my habit to first check out the discussion before going to the article proper.

Maybe because I’ve always been interested in the craft of writing, but I’m curious  to see what the sticking points are in the construction of the article. How are people negotiating the facts and the bias that they see? Who do they accede to? When does debate end? As I find myself creating more and more collaborative pieces of writing (Google Docs and Google Notebooks in particular) I find the process to be very different from the writing I normally do. And I keep thinking what a necessary part of the writing process this type of negotiation is going to be as we collaborate more and more on wikis and documents and videos and whatever else. When I ask teachers whether their students are writing employing truly collaborative practices (not simply “cooperative”) and whether they are writing either alone or together in hypertext environments (which I also believe is a part of writing literacy these days), blank stares usually ensue.

Teaching Wikipedia gives us the opportunity to do both, especially if we tune into those back channel conversations.

Gomes includes some interesting examples and statistics:

  • The 9,500 word article “Ireland,” for example spawned a 10,000 word discussion about whether “Republic of Ireland” would be a better name for the piece.
  • Wikipedia editors have spent 242,000 words trying to define “Truth.”
  • Here’s a quote from one entry: “I am not sure that it does not present an entirely Eurocentric view, nor can I see that it is sourced sufficiently well so as to be reliable.” That from the discussion on “Kittens.”
  • And ironically, if you search for the word “Discussion” you are sent to the word “Debate” where the discussion page includes a debate over whether “discussion” and “debate” are synonymous.

More reason why I still think Wikipedia is one of the most important sites on the Web right now for educators to fully get their brains around.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia

Filed Under: The Shifts, Wiki Watch

A Wikipedia Moment

July 12, 2007 By Will Richardson

So before my flight home got canceled, I had a great day just outside of Green Bay speaking to superintendents and principals at the FIEL conference about the Germanic influences on the English language. I mean…um…the Read/Write/Connect/Reflect Web.

But here was just a classic teachable moment:

I’m showing how the last 500 edits in Wikipedia occurred over the last 2.5 minutes and how that translates to something like 300,000 edits a day when someone raises his hand and says “so take a look at the very last edit on the list…the one about Ronald McDonald.” I look at my own list, and of course, due to the deluge of edits on Wikipedia, there is no Ronald McDonald edit listed, and so we go to the site and see (Caution: vile and unpretty stuff ahead) this. I say something like “yep, this is the issue with Wikipedia isn’t it? So let’s fix it.” And silly me, I start going in and deleting the picture and erasing the bad words, and by the time I’m done doing all of that I hit save and wouldn’t ya know, someone else had come in and reverted the page back to a more appropriate version.

“See?” I say. Vandals come in at 14:27 and start mucking it up, page fixed within 10 minutes.

That’s why Wikipedia is worth a second, third and fourth look from educators.

Amazing.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, literacy, education, learning, collaboration

Filed Under: Read/Write Web, Wiki Watch

Business Cards We Love to See

April 19, 2007 By Will Richardson

So a teacher named Diane Albanese came up to me before a presentation I was giving at the Delaware Instructional Technology Conference this morning and handed me this business card. Her students were presenting in a showcase last night and were handing out these little puppies…even gave one to the Lt. Governor. Now how cool is that?

And the wiki is pretty darn cool.

This is the stuff I really love, when teachers and students just begin to make this a natural part of what they do in the classroom. They write. They collaborate. They publish.

Way to go Danielle, Kim, Kayla, Dalton, William, Brandon, Aaron and Mrs. Albanese! Wikimasters Rule! And we would love you to come in and comment on this post (as other students have recently done) and tell us all more about what you’re doing.

Go Wikis! Go!

Technorati Tags: wikis, education, schools Delaware

Filed Under: The Shifts, Wiki Watch

Be an Information Constable

March 27, 2007 By Will Richardson

Citizendium, the “project, started by a founder of Wikipedia [which] aims to improve on the Wikipedia model with accountability and academic-quality articles as cornerstones of its work” goes live in beta today. They have 180 expert editors and 800 authors that have already worked on 1,000 articles. They also have “constables” which are:

friendly, hard-working folks who make sure the community runs smoothly. If you break a rule, a constable might gently tap you on the shoulder and explain what’s wrong. Constables make decisions solely about behavior, not about content, which is the domain of editors.

Here’s an essay by founder Larry Sanger as to why he thinks Citizendium, depite the name, will succeed. I’d like to participate, but unfortunately right now I don’t have a “non-free” e-mail address which is a requirement to be accepted.

I’ll be interested to see how things go here. What happens after the first sign of misinformation or vandalism???

Technorati Tags: Citizendium, wiki, information, learning, education

Filed Under: The Shifts, Wiki Watch

Research on Wikipedia/Trusting the Source of the Source

February 24, 2007 By Will Richardson

(Via Smart Mobs) So here is a research study (and I mean research, full of all sorts of funny looking formulas and symbols and stuff) about Wikipedia that comes to the conclusion that the more edits there are to a particular article the more accurate it is. Not surprising, to me at least, but since smart people are publishing quantitative results, it might add to the discussion.

Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English-language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

The conversations I had this week about Wikipedia with the schools I was working with in Atlanta were pretty heated at times. But it’s interesting how it quickly turns into a larger discussion about students as editors in general, and that Wikipedia ain’t the only problem we have in terms of what to trust and what not to trust. And that quickly turns into another discussion about how the network (if you have one) filters out much of the good stuff, just as it did in this instance. You may not trust the source, but if you trust the person or people who sent you the source, the source inherently becomes more trustworthy.

Or something like that…

Technorati Tags: learning, literacy, Wikipedia, trust

Filed Under: Literacy, Wiki Watch

"Nervous but Thrilled"–Yet Another Flat Wiki Project

November 29, 2006 By Will Richardson

So the project wiki run continues with this entry from Chris Craft in South Carolina whose students are prepping for a flat-ish Skype call with students at the American School in Lima, Peru next month. In this iteration, groups of kids are studying various aspects of the Peruvian culture and economy that will serve as the basis of their discussion. Chris is going to try to capture the event and hopefully he’ll be able to share it out later.

On his blog yesterday, he was talking about a “dry run” that he did with the Peruvian teacher. At first, the technology didn’t cooperate very well, but when they got it going, it was electric. Here’s a snippet:

When the video flipped on the class went wild. They quickly settled down and we chatted with a teacher down there. My kids were nervous but thrilled! They stepped up to the mic (figuratively and literally) and did a great job muddling through basic Spanish. The teacher there spoke perfect English, and she was gracious about it.

Then the cool stuff happened. Her room started to fill up with kids.

Then my kids got to talk to their kids.

That was cool to watch.

Isn’t that what we want our kids to be? Nervous but thrilled? That’s the edgy-ness that these technologies bring, a nervousness that’s built on a couple pinches of newness and risk at pushing through your limits, and a thrill of doing something real and immediate. Aren’t those the times when we really learn about oursevles and really cement our knowledge?

Compare that to taking tests when our students are mostly just nervous. Which would you want for your own kids?

Go, wikis! Go!

technorati tags:wiki, education, learning

Filed Under: Classroom Practice, Connectivism, The Shifts, Wiki Watch

Flat Classroom Project Wiki

November 28, 2006 By Will Richardson

Ok…sit down before you check this out.

If you want to see the potential of what we can do with this stuff, take a look at what Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis have created in their Flat Classroom Project. Julie, who is at the International School Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Vicki who is at Westwood High in Georgia, have collaborated on an amazing undertaking that will connect their kids in a study of the 10 Flattners from Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat. In small groups comprised of students from both schools, they’ll be taking the next few weeks to really dig into what’s happening in the two countries from a global perspective and report out in a variety of ways using Read/Write Web tools. In the end, if the grading rubric is any indication, these kids will know a heck of a lot more about their places in the world, the complexities of the age, and the ways in which these tools are changing the way we do business in more than one sense.

Pinch me, but is there all of a sudden a little string of interesting examples of Read/Write Web projects coming together? I know…this example in particular is the result of some amazing and intensive planning. (Did I mention the rubric?) But it makes clear what I think are the two most important aspects of using these tools…first, we have to stop seeing our classrooms as spaces with four walls. Teachers must be willing to be connectors. And second, in the context of those connections, we can give our students real, meaningful, relevant opportunities to teach the rest of us what they know. The fact that the work of these students will be published in its many forms to the world as a whole is just so radically removed from the ways most educators still look at what happens in the classroom. If we are simply content to shuffle paper back and forth only for the sake of slapping an assessment on the work, we are doing our students a grave disservice.

Go and listen to the voices of these kids. (And don’t forget the rubric.) And trumpet this work far and wide. Perhaps Thomas Friedman, who actually sent Julie an e-mail acknowledging the project, will be impressed enough to really give this community a boost (like maybe an op-ed piece in the New York Times???)

Congratulations Julie and Vicki…can’t wait to see what happens next.

technorati tags:wiki, education, learning, The_World_is_Flat, Thomas_Friedman

Filed Under: The Shifts, Wiki Watch

Great Fifth Grade Book Wiki

November 21, 2006 By Will Richardson

Two fifth grade reading classes in Georgia have put together what I think is a great example of a book study wiki filled with information about the book itself and contextual information including photo slide shows, audio recordings of student performances, interviews and historical reports. The book is Patricia Beatty’s Turn Homeward Hannalee. One thing that I think is especially cool is that the teachers took the time to add their reflections to the site which is a great way for the rest of us to learn and think about how this might work in our own practice:

This project gave the students the opportunity to “become the teacher” and is a great example of authentic learning. The students immediately took ownership of this project, so I was able to simply facilitate the process. I was pleasantly surprised that everything ran so smoothly even though I had never attempted to create a website on my own or with my students. Since the students were each given a different area to work on they were able to express what they had learned in their own unique way. This activity allowed the students to integrate what they had learned to create something new. Also, it gave the students a confident feeling to see their work in a format that will help other students and teachers learn about the two thousand Georgia mill workers who were shipped north by the Union Army during the Civil War, and the many other historical facts and interesting information from Turn Homeward, Hannalee.

I know I say this a lot, but this is a perfect example of giving our students the opportunity to teach what they have learned. This work now has a chance of becoming a part of other students’ study of not only this book but this part of the state’s history. In Marco Torres’ words, this is work “that has wings.” BTW, the teachers are also looking to get feedback from other educators, students and readers.

technorati tags:education, wiki, learning

Filed Under: Classroom Practice, Wiki Watch

Wikipedia Classroom Ideas

September 23, 2006 By Will Richardson

Stephen points to a listing of Wikipedia school and university projects that gives some interesting examples of how we might think about teaching Wikipedia. Most of these are higher ed examples, but I think many are still relevant for K-12. There are a fair amount of suggested uses for Wikipedia in the classroom as well. However you might decide to implement Wikipedia or wikis with your students, don’t forget to make good use of the discussion function, which, personally, I’m coming to think is the most interesting part of the whole wiki process. Take a look, for instance, at the talk page devoted to the most recent space shuttle mission. I know I can be geeky at times, but I find the whole discussion about standardizing the time format in the article to be just fascinating.

technorati tags:wikipedia, education, classroom, collaboration, weblogg-ed

Filed Under: Wiki Watch

Free Wikis for Educators

September 12, 2006 By Will Richardson

Adam Frey and the gang at Wikispaces want to give away 100,000 free wikis to educators and I think we should help them meet their goal, don’t you? You can create a public space that is open to anyone, a protected space where anyone can see the work but only members can edit, or a totally private space where only wiki members can work. in other words, there’s a flavor for every taste.

If you want to see the potential of wikis, visit Vicki Davis at Westwood High, or Paul Allison at High School Collaborative Writing or any of the many other great examples out there.

technorati tags:wikis, education, wikispaces, learning, weblogg-ed

Filed Under: Wiki Watch

The Wonders of Publication

June 17, 2006 By Will Richardson

I added this article from today’s Times about Wikipedia to the EdBloggerNews site (which if you haven’t gone there and signed up for an account and subscribed to the RSS feed and added the bookmarklet to your toolbar so you can start contributing yet you should) and this quote just jumped out at me:

Wikipedians often speak of how powerfully liberating their first contribution felt. Kathleen Walsh, 23, a recent college graduate who majored in music, recalled the first time she added to an article on the contrabassoon.

“I wrote a paragraph of text and there it was,” recalled Ms. Walsh. “You write all these pages for college and no one ever sees it, and you write for Wikipedia and the whole world sees it, instantly.”

What is it Dave Winer always says? “Bling!”

UPDATE: I just realized that Clarence already posted to EdBloggerNews and that two people commented on the post. I’m diggin’ it! (Shouldn’t you be?)

technorati tags:Wikipedia, Connective_Writing, EdBloggerNews

Filed Under: On My Mind, Read/Write Web, Wiki Watch

Wiki Solution Manuals

May 5, 2006 By Will Richardson

Darren lights upon another great idea with the creation of wiki problem solving sites for his kids (and Clarence has picked up the ball as well.) As he puts it, his students are creating the textbook in their blogs, and now they can create supporting resources in the wiki. Read the thinking that he put behind how to structure and assess the work his students are doing. It’s pretty brilliant.

And this is an idea with legs, I think. With math, the concept of a solution manual is pretty straightforward, but how about translation manuals for world language students, or manuals for English class where students develop models of effective writing, or a history manual where students create context for important events or people, or lab manuals for bio or chemistry, or… Again, this goes back to the idea that we have almost unlimited opportunities for our students to learn by teaching…teaching each other or teaching the world. (Darren wants to connect lots of students to these wikis creating a “World Wide Wiki.” Might be tough to implement, but the expansive way of looking at it is right on.)

And just a note about pbwiki which has quickly become one of the best choices out there for wiki ideas. The creators are constantly tweaking the software and have made some real strides toward making it classroom accessible of late. There are still some issues to think through when choosing to use a wiki with your students, but there seems to be a nice balance between privacy and transparency that teachers can reach with some thinking and planning (and reading of Darren’s blog…)

So, what other ways can we twist Darren’s idea?

Filed Under: Classroom Practice, Wiki Watch

Ed Week on Wikis

April 5, 2006 By Will Richardson

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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Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Track and Field Wiki

March 29, 2006 By Will Richardson

(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?)

Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Wikiville Your Place

March 8, 2006 By Will Richardson

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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Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

UK Wiki Photos at Flickr

February 16, 2006 By Will Richardson

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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Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Wiki Work–Volunteers?

February 9, 2006 By Will Richardson

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.

Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Samoans, Football, Wikipedia and Dale

February 6, 2006 By Will Richardson

(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

Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Wikipedia Defense

December 16, 2005 By Will Richardson

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.

Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

December 15, 2005 By Will Richardson

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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Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Great Deconstruction of Student Wiki Work

December 15, 2005 By Will Richardson

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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Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

In Defense of Wikipedia

December 12, 2005 By Will Richardson

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?”

Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Wikipedia Woes

December 5, 2005 By Will Richardson

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.

Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

Great Books Without Great Authors?

October 28, 2005 By Will Richardson

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.

Filed Under: General, Wiki Watch

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