(From Kairosnews🙂

1. Write a craptacular draft full of factual errors, incredible sources, and grammatical/mechanical mistakes.
2. Post it to Wikipedia.
3. Wait a few days and let the community clean it up for you.
4. Turn it in!

Oy.

I’ve been a fervent supporter of Wikipedia and the idea of collaborative content creation, and I still am. But lately I’ve been trying to get out of the “echo chamber” and consume some alternative viewpoints regarding the things I hold dear. (I’ve even been spending some time at Instapudit lately…) The discussions over at Lessig Blog about what should be free led me to “The Great Failure of Wikipedia” by Jason Scott, which, to put it mildly, offers a contrarian point of view:

This is what the inherent failure of wikipedia is. It’s that there’s a small set of content generators, a massive amount of wonks and twiddlers, and then a heaping amount of procedural whackjobs. And the mass of triddlers and procedural whackjobs means that the content generators stop being so and have to become content defenders. Woe be that your take on things is off from the majority. Even if you can prove something, you’re now in the situation that anybody can change it. And while that’s all great in a happy-go-lucky flower shower sort of way, it’s when you realize that the people who are going to change it could have absolutely no experience with the subject whatsoever, then you see where we are.

Now I know he comes at this from a content creation point of view vs. the content consumption relationship that most of us have with Wikipedia. But it’s an interesting read, one that has certainly got me thinking about my own somewhat euphoric view.
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Jimmy Wales (the creator of Wikipedia) is guest posting over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog on “Ten Things That Will Be Free.” Today’s installment is a free curriculum:

The second thing that will be free is a complete curriculum (in all languages) from Kindergarten through the University level. There are several projects underway to make this a reality, including our own Wikibooks project, but of course this is a much bigger job than the encyclopedia, and it will take much longer.

In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.

And you can hear the chorus of “Butwhatabout”s from educators of every stripe who have yet to understand what’s happening “out there.” It’s like I tell those who are the vicitims of my blogvangelizing, it’s not that you necessarily have to use all of these tools (though that would be nice because kids need models for how to use them well,) but it is that you have got to get your brain to recognize what social, collaborative, easy content creation and publishing means to our classrooms and to our practice. It is transformational, and to not take the time to at least consider the potential could very well render you irrelevant in short order.

If you do read the whole post, make sure you read the discussion that follows as well.
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(via Steve Cohen) So look at the graphs, but get your brain around these stats about Wikipedia:

Over 4,000 new articles a day.

An average of 14 edits per entry.

About 57,000 people who have edited at least 10 times.

About 2.7 million edits in May

Amazing…
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Alex Halavais has an interesting post about ways we might think about certifying the value of Wikipedia, and I think he gets it right when he argues that just assigning academics with PhDs or “acknowledged experts” to do the work is probably not the right way to do it:

First, that some absolute fools manage to get the doctorate. Some of these fools graduate from the best schools out there, and some of the less able programs graduate more fools than scholars. So, the Ph.D. is certainly not a measure of insight. Indeed, how many business cards have you received with the “, Ph.D.” after the name and thought that this was a replacement for any obvious signs of intelligence.

Moreover, there are plenty of brilliant people who will never get a Ph.D. The degree has a lot to do with a conforming to a particular set of social and economic conditions, and it is not the best learning fit for very many people. It was good for me, I think (still working that one out), but it’s not for everybody. And I have flunked some truly brilliant people out of our own program because I knew that while they were smart and able, they were not going to be able to complete a degree.

I do think that the average Ph.D., and perhaps the average faculty member, is an expert in their field and able to teach about it. But just as with the Wikipedia, that expertise is only most of the time on most of their specialized topics. The difference is that there is social acceptance of this form of authority. And the question is how to lend that authority to Wikipedia.

It’s good stuff, and it takes Andy Carvin’s recent post on student examination of Wikipedia a step further. I find this whole discussion hugely interesting and valuable in thinking about so many things: writing, information literacy, research, open content…

Last night at a pre conference dinner, Alan asked all of those in attendance to introduce themselves and talk about what their fantasy for technology was. The answers were mostly about the desire to connect everyone to this resource that’s becoming such an important part of our lives. And after achieving that access, I said my fantasy might actually be coming true right before my eyes in Wikipedia. I am still so incredibly inspired by the idea that thousands of people from around the world can collaboratively contribute to the creation of such a vast and impressive resource all the while asking nothing in return and remaining anonymous. It feels like such a gift, and feels like such a shift in what is now possible.

(via David Warlick) Andy Carvin comes up with lesson plan that gets the most out of the unverifiableness of Wikipedia. Bottom line, use it to teach the type of information literacy skills we should be applying to much of what we read these days:

Here’s a quick scenario. Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups, with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic. Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.

Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it? Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed about horses on the page.

This is where it gets fun. The group of students breaks down the content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their way through the list, they’ll find themselves with two possible outcomes: either they’ll verify that a particular factoid is correct, or they’ll prove that it’s not. Either way, they’ll generate a paper trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or another.

Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry’s talk page and present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections, with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry they’ve verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and referenced – hopefully with multiple sources.

Get enough classrooms doing this, you kill several birds with one stone: Wikipedia’s information gets better, students help give back to the Net by improving the accuracy of an important online resource, and teachers have a way to make lemons into lemonade, turning Wikipedia from a questionable information source to a powerful tool for information literacy.

I would only add one step to this and that is to have a Wikipedia Party at the end to reflect on why this process is so important these days and how to apply it to other sources. I’d start by asking my students questions such as:

What can we say in general about the accuracy of Wikipedia and our use of it in research?

What aspects of this process should become part of our normal routine in consuming information from less traditonal sources?

How does it feel to be a part of this collaborative creation of knowledge? How does it differ from what used to be?

How would you boil this process down into some concrete, simple strategies that younger students could implement to teach them good information habits?

Nice idea that I think would work for older kids as well. And read all of Andy’s post for some great context.

And don’t forget the “Great Wrongopedia Contest” where students get prizes for finding and fixing bad information? Or how about “Wikipediaball” where students get two points for fixing an error, one point for adding information, and three points for starting an entry with a minimum of, say, 250 words? I’m just sayin…
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(Cross posted to ETI) So in the middle of my Tablet PC training yesterday I got sidetracked and started talking about Wikipedia. As it happened, the London bombings was another opportunity to watch collaborative construction of knowledge in process.

Here is the first post on Wikipedia at a little after 10 am London time started by Morwen.

On July 7, 2005, explosions or other incidents were reported at various London Underground stations in central London, specifically Aldgate, Edgware Road, Kings Cross St Pancras, Old Street and Russell Suare tube station. They have been attributed to power surges.

The stations do not share the same line. The incidents led to the immediate evacuation of many stations and apparently now the entire London Underground network and much of the City of London.

It takes 10 minutes for someone else to join Morwen in making changes. Nine minutes later, someone adds external links with the note

“Nobody knows what’s going on WHOLY S**T!!!!?~!!111!11!”

A minute later, the language has been removed. A couple of minutes later, a table of contents is added, which is then edited out, only to return 2 minutes later. In the eight minutes between 10:18 and 10:26 am, 52 edits are made. Within the next hour, 46 (by my count) other contributors join in and the post grows to about 650 words.

Now, here we are a day and a half later. At this writing the article just crossed 2,500 edits and is nearing 3,500 words in length. I’m not going to count how many different contributors there have been, but it’s easily in the hundreds. The amount of information is once again amazing. And I would argue the accuracy of the article is probably as good as you’ll get from any major media outlet (although the writing may not be as good.)

I find all of this amazing, and I find myself thinking more and more about what it means. The teachers in the class yesterday pushed back a bit against this whole open content concept. I showed them the South African curriculum wiki and they were amazed, yes, but concerned too. (As am I…go look at what I edited out of that site just now. Can’t imagine what I would have done had that been there yesterday…) Our whole concepts of accuracy and trust and truth are being challenged and redefined. This feels like such a big shift, such a HUGE shift for educators. And it’s just totally manic right now. The beauty of Wikipedia. The ugliness of spammers and other ne’er do wells. Opening things up creates both, unfortunately.

I don’t think we can fight these changes. The question then becomes how do we best navigate them.

Last week I noted that the LA Times “Wikitorial” experiment would probably be chaos and guess what? It was.

Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material.

Thanks and apologies to the thousands of people who logged on in the right spirit.

Well, that ought to help the wiki movement, don’tcha think? But they should have seen this from the beginning. I mean first of all, the idea of a wiki is to filter out opinion, not create it. A wiki just isn’t space built for competing ideas, even if there are two or three of them set up for the same general topic. (Even 20 or 30 might not make it.) A wiki is the place to collaborate on some semblence of unbiased truth about whatever the topic is. When you’re dealing with topics that have a minimum of right/left or right/wrong, wikis will work. But the idea that people in this country could collectively agree upon a statement about the Iraq war is idiocy. And so, the experiment failed.

Having said that, however, take a look at the discussions taking place at Wikipedia over such controversial topics as abortion and George W. Bush. It’s pretty interesting to watch the process. I had heard at one point that Wikipedia editors were “approving” changes to those pages though I’m not sure if that’s still the case.

Growing pains…

(Via Ross Mayfield) The Los Angeles Times says that it’s going to start letting its readers compose editorials via a wiki:

Watch next week for the introduction of “wikitorials” — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials.

Ok, so, like, that’s a pretty interesting development, huh? Probably going to be chaos. Can’t wait to see what happens with it.

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I’m on a wiki and Wikipedia bender of late, trying to get my brain around all of the implications for educators in terms of how to teach research and the use of sources. I think that this is actually a bigger challenge for elementary school teachers who are in that pre-exposition gray area. For instance, if my daughter gets assigned a “report” on Argentina, why wouldn’t she go first to the Wikipedia entry? The bigger question is why would she go anywhere else? The entry has 4,100 words and about 125 links to more information. It’s got maps and charts and pictures. It’s been edited like a gajillion times, most recently today with updated GDP figures. Ok, I know, I know. It might be all wrong. But you and I know…it’s not.

The bigger, bigger question is why should she do that report at all? I know she has to learn how to write, to organize ideas, to use different sources of information etc. And believe me, I want her to do all of those things. But do I want her doing what I did as a kid? (I did Argentina, you know.)

This goes back to George Seimens’ articulation of “know where” instead of “know what” learning. If she has access to the information and knows how to find it, isn’t that the important thing?

Of course, when kids are starting to defend thesis statements and pulling together different people’s opinions and all that good stuff, this all changes. Wikipedia might be a source, but that’s when they should be blogging.

The whole concept of Wikipedia still gives me chills sometimes, especially when I see new representations of the collaborative power behind it. I just think it’s such an inspirational accomplishment, and, even though I know this sounds really, really weird, in some ways I think Wikipedia represents a glimmer of hope for a world that in many other ways I see heading for some dark days. That in itself sounds pretty depressing…

Anyway, via Steve Cohen comes this very cool real-time update log of Wikipedia. You can see the line for each edit in Wikipedia as it’s made. In the few moments it’s taken to create this post, over 80 edits have been made about everything from the Pakistani Coast Guard to Keropok (the most visible fried snack in Terengganu) to Mog (a playable character from the Squaresoft game Final Fantasy VI…Huh?) How cool is that? And how cool is it that just in these last 15 minutes, dozens if not hundreds of people have felt compelled to add what they know to this “compendium of all human knowledge.”

And I also think it’s cool that Steve Jobs called Wikipedia one of the most accurate encyclopedias in the world. That probably won’t convince my librarians, but it can’t hurt…

Not as far fetched as it seems…

Stephen O’Grady posts that to control the effects of Avian flu H5N1, it seems one scientist is counting on the Wikipedia entry about the illness:

Citing the impact that Wikipedia had post-Tsunami, Dr. Lucas Gonzalez of the Canary Islands in Spain is attempting to use the publically authored and edited site to help prevent, slow and survive an outbreak. I find this fascinating not simply because it’s an illustration of the growing public awareness of the power of things like Wikipedia, but because of how different a world we live in.

As Barry discusses, one of the critical problems during the 1918 pandemic was one of communication. Fearing panic, the government cracked down on the media, using official and unofficial channels to suppress and control content they believed to be objectionable or incendiary. The unfortunate result of all of this was that the public completely lost faith in any sort of official media, and like the boy who cried wolf when the time came to get actually truthful information out, no one believed it. When you see reports daily that nobody’s really dying, and daily claims that the cure is almost here, then walk down the street and see crepe paper (used to mark houses where a victim had passed away) on every house, you know something’s not right. Hopefully we never test the hypothesis, but with Wikipedia – or more decentralized means like blogs – it’s difficult to imagine that sort of censorship in today’s world (unless the internet itself was shut down).

The Tsunami entry sold me on the value of Wikipedia, but this is a pretty amazing concept nonetheless. Even to consider this possibility inspires me…

I wonder if or how many schools are blocking Wikipedia?
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Dan McDowell left a comment on my looking for a wiki post the other day and pointed to his use of a wiki to build a “branching simulation” for his students’ study of the Holocaust. At first I didn’t really get it, but after a couple of trips back to look at it, it’s starting to sink in. What a great idea.

First, groups of students develop the outlines of a family living through the Holocaust based on historical and geographical research. Then, each group sets up a number of choices that the family must make, annotates each choice with pros and cons, and asks the reader to make one of the choices to see what happens. For instance, a Jewish family may at first have the choice of trying to run or following the Nazi instructions to report to a camp. Depending on the choice you make, you’re faced with another decision, and as the reader makes these choices, the narrative of the family is written.

The process for developing this simulation demands some fairly complex thinking and planning, and if you’re at all interested in this project take some time to read through it. But what a great use of a wiki, where page creation is easy and creating a webbed narrative like this can be a really fascinating experience.

Any other great uses of wikis in the classroom out there?

So I’m in search of wiki hosts that are free, have no ads, have an rss feed, and have login and password capability for educational use. (Almost a blog, I know.) What comes to mind???

So over on ETI, Tom says that I’d be spasm-ing over the fact that his boss Mark Shuttleworth feels “the future of educational content lies in the wiki.” He’s right…I am. The wiki for the entire national curriculum for South Africa is simply awe-inspiring. I can’t help but think that this collaborative construction of curriculum is in some way the future for many reasons…relevance and economics the most obvious. (Check out the California Open Source Textbook Project which aims to save the state over $200 million in five years.) I have so many questions about the site…will it stay open for all to edit? How are teachers being trained? How are they being encouraged to participate? How widespread will adoption be?

According to Tom, Mark also feels that

regular wikis alone aren’t quite powerful enough for a task this complex. We need what programmers call revision control systems that will closely track different versions and changes so we can evolve texts and curricula in an open, yet controlled way — the way open source development projects are managed, possibly modifying some of the same tools.

Amazing stuff. Not perfect, I know, and there’s obviously a lot to work through. But still…

I did some blogvangelizing to the state supervisors and principals association on Friday and I showed them this site. I’m not sure they understood exactly what it was they were seeing, but they all left eyes wide open about what these technologies are doing. Whether it’s wikis or blogs or podcasts of whatever, I think my new clarion call is that educators must start creating content, good content, and that their students should share in that creation. Tom’s also right to say that teachers and students need to learn collaboration with each other, and what better way than to share in the creation of and reflection about curriculum. But regardless the purpose, we need to get our teachers on this train…the sooner the better.

From the “I Can’t Understand Any Of It But I Know It Means Something Department” comes this list of 133 French wikis. (Or is that wikis in French?) And I got there from Mario Asselin’s wiki at his school Institut St-Joseph. It looks like the whole school is wiki-ed up. Sacre Bleu!

This is one time I wish I’d stayed awake in French 4 class…

Allez, wikis! Allez!

So here’s Steven’s take on the whole Wikipedia as a source issue:

I’ve had many conversations with colleagues about using Wikipedia as an online resource. Many say that we shouldn’t trust it. My usual replay is that we shouldn’t trust anything both online and off. That includes those ready-reference materials that sit right at the reference desk that we turn to to answer a basic query (are there any basic queries anymore?) We should treat Wikipedia like we treat anything online. With skepticism.

Does anyone know of a Wikipedia article that has been deconstructed for accuracy?

Pretty interesting article in yesterday’s USA Today on the growing uses of wikis in government circles. Get this:

The communities of practice wiki is not the only one drawing federal officials’ fascination. Patrick Hogan, learning technologies program manager at NASA, depends on a wiki site to program NASA software. An open-source program, NASA World Wind, lets users look at satellite imagery. They can peer into the Grand Canyon or follow the Nile River from its source, Lake Victoria, or leap over the Himalayas. Users in metropolitan areas can view street-level imagery. The program is popular, judging by the 2 million people who have downloaded it despite its 200M size.

And now those 2 million people — or anyone else — can suggest modifications to the program. A private enterprise, not affiliated with NASA, recently launched a wiki site called World Wind Central.

“These folks are not being paid by NASA at all and yet are providing a tremendous service to NASA,” Hogan said. The development community has donated hundreds of hours of coding effort, including a search tool for NASA World Wind’s 5 million locations and a mouse-over effect that simulates gravity’s varying strength worldwide, he said. Hogan routinely participates in the wiki and thanks outside developers. He has only a handful of full- and part-time employees, so he appreciates the free labor.

Wiki life is good, eh?
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(Via James, who has much to say on this as well…) This piece by Ulises Mejias takes a look at the writing process in wikis as a way to understand the need for what he calls a “social literacy” now needed when tackling collaborative writing spaces.

Thus, social literacy…does not refer to the skills necessary to perform in society, but to the use of the resource of writing in social contexts. Social literacy amounts to the textual practices not (as has been true so far) of a single author, but of multiple and simultaneous authors. Wikis make social literacy apparent by allowing us to witness the evolution of text in time, and evolution that reflects the decisions not of a single individual, but of a community.

In keeping the focus on literacy in the context of writing, this post does much to identify the ways in which we are going to need to prepare students for the negotiation of content and style that is going to be required to navigate these collaborative spaces. And there is much to say about the educational benefits of using wikispace to create content, but not to use it as a discussion space.

There are plenty of other online tools better equipped to support an Initiation-Reply mode of conversation (such as discussion boards for collective dialogue, or blogs and email for more individualized forms of exchange). If appropriate, these tools can be used in conjunction with wikis. But the whole point of wikis is to de-prioritize the individual voice in favor of the collective voice, which dictates the structure and content of the text. This, of course, is a literacy which most individuals in our societies are unaccustomed to. Which is why scaffolding wikis with other technologies that support more traditional forms of communication might be an adequate strategy.

Worth wrapping your brain around if you’re trying to find some context for wikis in your practice…
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In my real job, I’ve been trying to manage the process for changing the current five-computers in a classroom model at my school to something a bit more flexible and scalable, and we’re on the verge of selecting some pilot programs to implement this fall. Most notably is one that will involve outfitting about 30 teachers with Tablet PCs to try to see what effect they might have on delivery of the curriuclum, professional development, and student learning. Other pilots will most likely revolve around using iPods and thin client technology. And, like many other schools, we’re taking a serious look at a 1-1 student laptop program in the near future. Lots of work to do.

Now that we are entering the pilot phase, I’ve been thinking pretty hard about how to best support the project through online spaces like blogs and wikis. I think that setting up a blog for the teachers and encouraging them to reflect on their process and questions is going to be crucial. But I’m also thinking about a wiki as a space to capture resources and links for further study and research. With all of the bowing down I’ve been doing lately with wikis, it’s about time to start practicing what I preach, I think.

(Cross posted to ETI.) Ok, so I know I have been on a wiki bender of late, but there’s just so much that interests me about the technology, and I think I’m finally getting my brain around the potential. While wide open wikis may not make it in the classroom, creating sites with logins and passwords makes more and more sense to me. Especially when I see what Lawrence Lessig is doing.

Lessig is one of my few heroes out there right now. I am just in awe of the important changes he is championing regarding copyright and intellectual property. And there is no doubt that he “gets” what’s happening with the Read/Write Web. The concept of putting your work out there to not only share with readers but to invite those readers to help edit and improve the work is pretty amazing. But that’s what he’s doing with his wiki. It’s very cool.

And the other news with Lessig is that he walks his talk. His creation of the Creative Commons was intended to give content creators more power to decide how their content is used. And last week, he wrote on his blog that he will no longer write for the Minnesota Law Review because of their restrictive copyright policy.

But today, on the brink of publication, I had to confront the “Publication Agreement.” In order to give the Minnesota Law Review my work, I have also to give them my copyright. In particular, they get the “exclusive right to authorize the publication, reproduction, and distribution” of my work. They have in turn sold that right to Lexis and Westlaw.

Never again. It has taken me too long to resolve myself about this, and it was too late in the process of this article to insist on something different. But from this moment on, I am committed to the Open Access pledge:

I will not agree to publish in any academic journal that does not permit me the freedoms of at least a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Under that license, Lessig gives others the right “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and “to make derivative works” as long as they give attribution and don’t use it for commercial purposes. The implications of that are pretty profound, and it’s in part the evolution of blogs and wikis and the like that are driving these changes. If you think about this idea just a little, you can’t help but wonder what the shake out will be, in law and in education.
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As I’m still immersed in wikimania I came across this amazing deconstruction by John Udell of the Wikipedia entry on “Heavy Metal Umlaut“. If you really want to understand the inner workings of the collaborative construction of content revolution that we are watching happen right before our very eyes, run, don’t walk, to his presentation and be amazed. Great stuff…
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I’ve had wikis on the brain lately (as anyone subscribed to my Furl feed would know.) They were a hot topic at the workshop I did last weekend, and I’ve been putting together my presentation for CIL this week called “Wikis @ Your Library” (which, if anyone has any more links to wikis in libraries I’d love to see them.) So this article (via Amy Bowllan) from the Washington Post was pretty interesting and has some relevance.

Phillipson’s students can go to a wiki he designed and highlight a phrase in a poem such as John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” From “tender is the night,” for example, they could create links to their own essays, a scanned image of the ink-blotted original manuscript, artwork, something about the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with that title — anything.

While the Wikipedia model is very cool in terms of negotiated meaning of ideas, I’m starting to think the more applicable model for K-12 at least is the Northern Voice model where people add resources without doing too much in the way of collaborative writing.

But at any rate, this report highlights the way these technologies are taking hold in what seems to be a pretty positive form. Here’s a link that I dug up for the Artificial Paradise Project highlighted in the story.
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Not sure why I hadn’t run accross the Wikimedia Commons site before today, but I’m glad I finally did. Every time I find another wiki site like this I just find the concept very powerful. I just think it’s so cool that people would put their work into the public domain without the normal restrictions that copyright imposes. There are pictures, paintings, maps, drawings, audio files…and it appears new submissions are coming fast and furious.

On a side note, it’s actually pretty impressive the way the Wikimedia Foundation seems to be growing. If people start to really accept the idea of sharing content for the greater good, we may very well be on our way to a better place.

Looking at some of the premium photos, I think a masthead redesign here just may be in order…
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I’m gathering up links and ideas for my upcoming “Wikis @ Your Library” presentation at the CIL Conference in a few weeks, and I want to make sure that I’m not missing any good stuff to show the thousands who will no doubt be in attendance. Well, maybe dozens. Anyway, if you use wikis in your library, know of wikis in libraries, or have great ideas for wikis in libraries, please let me know. Just post a comment or e-mail me at will at weblogg-ed dot com. Thanks.
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