We are very happy to report that lots and lots of video from April’s Symposium — including John Elliott’s introductory remarks, the keynote address by Steve Kerr, the fireside chat with Judith Summerfield and both report-backs — is now available at Baruch’s Digital Media Library. Click here for our entry in the DML. Once you click on “Launch Media,” you will be able to navigate to the various parts of the video. Keynotes from past Symposia are coming soon to the DML.
I was not surprised to hear that WikiPedia was tightening its editorial policies. But after reading this article in today’s Times, I was intrigued and heartened by the limited way in which they’ve done so. According to this article, when Wikipedia limits who can edit an entry, it’s for a few days, a “cooling down period” to get vandals to lay off. Or they restrict an entry to editors who’ve been registered at Wikipedia for more than 4 days. Sounds quite lenient, really. And it sounds like it’s enough. The list of protected articles, which cannot be edited, includes “Human Rights in the People’s Republic of China,” and “Cuba;” articles which can be edited only by those who’ve been on Wikipedia for four or more days include “God,” “Michael Jackson,” “Christianity,” and (intriguingly) “Republic of Maldova.”
I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of Wikipedia vandalism. There’s a nice illustration of how it appears, and how swiftly those who see a particular entry as their “realm” may arrive to correct it, in Jon Udall’s amazing screencast “Heavy Metal Umlaut, the Movie” (which I’ve mentioned on the blog before as a wonderful illustration of how wikis work and how Wikipedia is edited–it’s interesting as well as really funny). In this example, vandalism appears and is corrected seconds later. Other items, which are not so closely monitored, may retain errors much longer. Those I’ve caught have been pretty blatant, and so not too “dangerous” to any but the most naive readers.
All of this is by way of saying that things are not bad in the Wikipedia world. Wikipedia users may not be up to 100% freedom, all the time. But they’re not doing so badly after all. The honor system works for most people, most of the time.
The best soundbite in the Times article was this:
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.”
That’s the first reason I love Wikipedia.
The second? A while back, I was co-facilitating at a seminar for teachers on ways to use blogs, wikis and so on. During a session in which participants looked at Wikipedia (in most cases for the first time), one teacher, new to Wikipedia, registered and started an entry on an African tribe that she noticed was not included. Within minutes, it had been added to and elaborated on by another user. It’s hard not to get excited about collaborative encyclopedia writing, in real-time, with complete strangers.
How are you using Wikis with your students?
PhD student bloggers were warned last year by Ivan Tribble (writing under a pseudonym in the Chronicle of Higher Education) that blogs with one’s real name attached might pose a threat to one’s search for a tenure-track teaching job. The article was controversial. Some respondents on the Chronicle’s forums agreed, while others objected on the basis that having a blog could enhance one’s professional persona. The article’s author trotted out many examples of “academic” bloggers who exposed aspects of their lives that job search committees would find disturbing. Still other readers objected (pointlessly, you have to admit) to the very idea that potential employers might google applicants. Others felt that most people who wrote anything but 100% professional blogs had already realized they should only write to an anonymous blog. (Of course, Tribble, who himself hid under a pseudonym, made it clear that no blogs were good blogs as far as he–as a search committee member–was concerned.)
Then The New York Times addressed the phenomena of employee bloggers a few weeks back. And now, it has turned its sights to other embarrassing materials students leave scattered about online. Apparently, students post all kinds of embarrassing things on myspace.com, Friendster, and Facebook, not to mention personal blogs. It’s a reminder that we need, somehow, somewhere, to address students about these kinds of issues. I’ve always tried to do my little bit to support careers services by mentioning to students in my classes that they might want to have a professional email address to use with professors, and those who hire interns and employees, and frankly, anyone involved in one’s education or work career. It is not always readily apparent to students that “hotgirl357@hotmail” or even “RoyalsFan69@yahoo” is maybe not the best email to use in professional settings: they’re memorable, sure, but for the wrong reasons. Being a Royals fan is probably not going to lose students any interviews, but don’t they want email-ees to know the name of the person the message is coming from? When students are reminded of these issues, they usually get it.
But there’s more than embarrassing email addresses at stake. We should be encouraging students early and often to think about what they’re putting out there with their names attached. As this University of Illinois student who was looking for a job (who was cited in the Times article “For Some, Online Persona Undermines Resume”) discovered too late, students should consider who might be reading:
At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate’s Web page with this description of his interests: “smokin’ blunts” (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.
It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.
“A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?” said the company’s president, Brad Karsh. “Why are you allowing this to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?”
If they want to post less-than-professional descriptions of themselves on Facebook, myspace, or otherwise, students should think about the usefulness of pseudonyms.
They’re good enough for Ivan Tribble at the Chronicle, after all.
That’s the no-brainer, right? Don’t attach your name to anything you don’t want your name attached to. But the issue becomes murkier–and this is where Ivan Tribble invited all kinds of argument–when what students or employees or academics are putting online is more-or-less professional. At that point, is Tribble right? Is blogging still a no-no? What rules should we follow when using our names online? Assuming we’re sharing our views on higher-level issues than smokin’ blunts, and we’re not dragging anyone’s name through the mud, at what point does any online writing cross the line to become too personal? At what point do we expose something we should not?
…I didn’t realize my family was special for having one of the early Commodore 64 home computers. I also didn’t realize how fortunate I would later feel at having learned a little Basic (the programming language), and how to touch-type when I was eleven. But today’s kids–whoo! I’m envious.
As reported in the New York Times today, we now have Arts and Crafts for the Digital Age. The German Science Studies theorist Friedrich Kittler has argued that one of the problems with the way most people currently interface with technology is that it is entirely at the level of software. The average person knows very little about their computer’s hardware, and is possibly quite frightened by it. We tend to assume it’s very powerful, and easily damageable. But with the PicoCricket Kit, designed by Mitchell Resnick (assistant professor of learning research at the MIT Media Lab), any child who can afford this $250 toy can begin to interact with digital technologies as both hardware and software. They can learn to program the small computer that comes along with the pipe cleaners, the legos, the electric wiring, and the felt.
The Vex Robot, from InnovationFirst (a robotics company) and Radioshack, is also mentioned. The article quotes a vice-president at InnovationFirst, “Talk to the average high school students, they are a lot smarter…They like open-ended problems, and a lot like to take the tools that are available to solve open-ended problems.” Not mentioned in the article is technoartist Natalie Jeremijenko, who has worked with high school and university students to reprogram robotic dogs made by Sony. These newly ‘feral dogs,’ so named for their street-smart capabilities, are able to sniff out toxic waste such as dry cleaning solvents and paint thinner. Robots… the next critical thinking tool?
When I was a kid, my mother bought my sister and I Erector Sets, in the hopes that we would become engineers. Maybe I’ll just have to save up for the PicoCricket Kit.
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