Archive for the 'Wikis' Category

Learning 2.0: free, fun, self-paced, and effective training in Web 2.0

Published
by
Kate
on April 5, 2007
in Administration, Blogs and Blogging, Faculty Development, Higher Education, Literacy, Technology, Web 2.0, What if . . . and Wikis
. 1 Comment

The article “Public Library Geeks Take Web 2.0 to the Stacks” on Wired.com describes a program where hundreds of staff members at North Carolina public libraries were asked to explore Web 2.0 in ways by trying out 23 things that were simple, yet meaningful and useful.

The result: Learning 2.0.

The impetus was the need for staff to know about Web 2.0 technologies:

When the IT director at North Carolina’s Charlotte & Mecklenburg County public library began training staff in the latest web technologies, she lured reluctant participants with bribes — a free MP3 player and the chance to win a laptop.

Six months later, the program they developed is the real prize. Learning 2.0., developed by public services technology director Helene Blowers, has become a surprise grassroots hit, available for free on the web and adopted by dozens of other libraries around the globe.

“The last thing we want is for people to come into our libraries and ask about Flickr or Second Life and be met with a blank look,” said Christine MacKensie, director of the Yarra Plenty Regional Library in Melbourne, Australia, which just finished a four-month version of Learning 2.0. “And they certainly won’t now.”

The program is inexpensive to run, but is fun and engaging. Hundreds of staff members signed on.

Recognizing that librarians need to know how to participate in the new media mix if libraries are to remain relevant, Blowers challenged her 550 staffers to become more web savvy. Using free web tools, she designed the program and gave staff members three months to do 23 things.

They created blogs and podcasts, tried out Flickr, set up RSS feeds, learned about wikis, uploaded video to YouTube, played with image generators and Rollyo, and explored Technorati, tagging and folksonomies.

“Librarian avatars were popping up all over the blogs,” said Blowers.

In the end, the library system found that they’d just trained their staff in new media with very little financial output (save some blog hosting and the mp3 incentives), without going to the trouble and expense of bringing in staff training, or forcing people to sit through classes.

Although her original goals for Learning 2.0 were touchy-feely “E’s” — exposing staff to new tools, encouraging play, empowering individuals, expanding the knowledge toolbox, eliminating fear — the effects were both practical and financial.

“We don’t have to wait for some training company to come along and say, ‘For $20,000 we’ll show you how this stuff works,’” said Michael Stephens, who wrote Web 2.0 and Libraries: Best Practices for Social Software. “Helene put it on the web so anyone can use that program.”

Libraries all over the world are doing just that — moving the entire Learning 2.0 program to their own websites. The program has been duplicated by university and community library systems in Sweden, Australia, Canada and Denmark. In the United States, programs are underway in South Carolina, Florida, Maryland and California. Even the Combined Arms Research Library, a military repository, is trying it.

It’s no surprise that now the 23 Things idea is spreading beyond libraries, to two realms cac.ophony.org readers are much more familiar with: higher education, and business.

Now Blowers’ program is spreading beyond libraries (even virtual ones, like the teen library in Second Life teen library in Second Life): A public relations firm wants to set up a Learning 2.0 program for its staff, and several universities and an elementary school want to use the system to educate teachers, she said.

Several years ago, I taught a semester-long course and some weekend workshops with Paul Allison and Ken Stein of the New York City Writing Project. We walked participants (mostly high school teachers, but also some CUNY and SUNY college faculty) through various experiences, from setting up a blog, editing a wiki, to using bloglines, del.icio.us and tags (this is a few years ago, mind you, when bloglines, del.icio.us, and podcasts were “new” new, or at least a newer new, not old hat, as they are now). Then, as now, new stuff was coming out every week.

The New York City Writing Project was interested in giving teachers a chance to blog, so they’d see if, and how, blogs might be useful for their students. They ended up finding out how blogs, flickr, podcasting, WiKis and all kinds of other web 2.0 applications could be useful in teaching literacy and communication skills, and they ended up using these, and other aspects of Web 2.0, in their classrooms. The 23 Things idea is very similar, though the 23 things could easily be tweaked to include the newest useful Web 2.0 technology, since good new stuff comes out all the time.

Perhaps the best thing about Web 2.0, and Learning 2.0 is that so many resources that work, like the 23 Things program, are free to use and free to build on.

007 goes Web 2.0

Published
by
Tom
on December 19, 2006
in Blogs and Blogging and Wikis
. 1 Comment

Mikhail recently pointed out to me the cover article from the December 3, 2006, New York Times Magazine: “Open-Source Spying” (available digitally to NYT members or for a one-time charge here; or through “Proquest Newspapers” or “Business & Company Resource Center” databases). As he noted, and I have been spending some time thinking about, the article raises some interesting questions related to our use of blogs, wikis, and other information sharing technologies in the realm of education.

Despite intelligence analysts’ emphasis on secretiveness, their success relies heavily on collaboration. This phenomenon is not new, but has been gaining more attention post-9/11 as agency leaders consider (or are forced to consider) altering traditional, hierarchical structure in the face of a newly-defined enemy. “To fight a network like Al Qaeda,” says a professor of defense at the Naval Postgraduate School, “you need to behave like a network.”

Based on this philosophy, U.S. intelligence agencies are piloting new (relatively cheap) information systems modeled after “Web 2.0 technologies” such as blogs and wikis, to see if systems that favor rapid, relatively free flow of information can outperform their current (very expensive) systems, which favor secrecy but restrict inter-agency communication. Supporters of the new technologies hope they will enable analysts across agencies to effectively ‘connect the dots’ (disparate shreds of evidence turned up across the world). They aim to harness “the wisdom of the crowd” (ranging from large groups of government analysts to huge groups of public amateurs depending on the security level) in the manner of Wikipedia, drawing conclusions that even the sharpest experts can reach in isolation.

Not surprisingly, the use of information technology to disperse more information to more people raises challenges for spies, some of which overlap with those encountered by educators. The most prominent problem is data overload. One interviewee points out that the already difficult challenge of finding a needle in a haystack is not alleviated by new technologies that make it easier for more hay to be dumped onto the pile.

Additionally, there is the hurdle of achieving a critical mass of users. Particularly in the case of wikis, the power of collaboration lies in numbers. In the case of an inter-agency intelligence wiki now being piloted this means persuading thousands of employees to participate in the new venture, requiring a major cultural shift in communication. In the case of blogs, a similar situation arises where traffic remains low until a dense enough network of links moves a certain blog into overlapping discussions.

The bottom line here is that the spies are taking a page from the social networkers. Whether they succeed or not is yet to be seen. My question is what can educators learn from the spies? To what degree do universities face an analogous problem as the intelligence agencies, and what might effective inter-departmental, inter-faculty, or inter-student collaboration look like?

Webster and Wikis

Published
by
Anthony
on November 7, 2006
in Language and Wikis
. 2 Comments

There’s a fascinating history of Noah Webster’s iconographic American dictionary in the Nov. 6, 2006 edition of The New Yorker (”Noah’s Mark,” by Jill Lepore).  When Webster first proposed a “Dictionary of the American Language” in 1800, he was roundly criticized for planning to include new words spoken by common people.  The logic behind the attacks, writes Lepore, “went something like this: Because any words new to the United States are either stupid or foreign, there is no such thing as the ‘American language’; there’s just bad English.”

Much later, Webster’s was still criticized for its egalitarian tendencies: “In this magazine [The New Yorker], Dwight Macdonald complained that Webster’s Third had debased the language ‘in the name of democracy.’  The dictionary’s editorial staff had called for a show of hands to make decisions about words and usage.  Macdonald challenged both the method and its premise: ‘If nine-tenths of the citizens of the United States…were to use inviduous, the one-tenth who clung to invidious would still be right, and they would be doing a favor to the majority if they continued to maintain the point’.”

Lepore continues: “It’s probably a good thing Macdonald isn’t around to browse through the Wiktionary, the online, user-written dictionary launched in 2002 by Wikipedia, and billed as the future of lexicography.  There’s no show of hands at Wiktionary.  There’s not even an editorial staff.”

The implication seems to be that opponents of the “legitimatization” of common usage in language would criticize “Wiki” developments simply because they’re “democratic.”  Yet linguistic inclusiveness surely does not lead inevitably to the acceptance of all sources of information as (at least potentially) valid, I would think.  Aren’t Wikis problematic (potentially) on other grounds?  I wonder what Noah Webster would make of the Wiki phenomenon. 

Purpose-built Wikis

Published
by
James Drogan
on September 29, 2006
in Group Composing, Peer Review, Revision and Wikis
. 0 Comments

EdTechPost brought me a post NoteMesh - another student-centric note taking service.  Upon first read, I thought this sort of collaborative approach to note-taking — an essential skill in my estimation — to be detrimental to learning.  Maybe not.  Maybe collaboration between the stronger and weaker students could result in “the rising tide lifting all boats.”

After all, an essential element of education is, in my view, the development of knowledge, skill, and experience in working on teams.

Veni, Vidi, Wiki

Published
by
Kate
on September 7, 2006
in Communication Intensive Courses (CICs), Group Composing, Technology and Wikis
. 2 Comments

Wired online has a nice article today talking about Wikis beyond WikiPedia. In particular, it explores some of the other programs that are useful for groups creating a WiKi:

Several companies are trying to cash in on wikis by making it easy for non-techies to start sites allowing quick and easy collaboration. Among them are Jot, Wetpaint, PBwiki, Wikispaces, Wiki.com and Wikia, started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

Some of these wikis already allow WYSIWYG editing. “I’d like to see the PTA wiki. We are on the cusp of making the tools simple enough for the Parent Teacher Association,” said Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. Socialtext is attempting to make its WYSIWYG click-and-type editor more widespread; at this year’s Wikimania conference, Socialtext announced it was working with Wikia and Wikimedia to integrate Wikiwyg into Wikipedia’s software.

I am wondering if any of our readers (or bloggers) have used any of the above Wiki sites for course-related wikis.
Check out the article!

Also: file under meta-blogging, I guess, but I just copied and pasted from Wired’s website and noticed that all the hotlinks carried over. I never noticed that before. WordPress (the blogging medium we are using here at http://cac.ophony.org) is good.

Blogs for Books: An Experiment

Published
by
Joanna
on July 25, 2006
in Audience, Blogs and Blogging, Peer Review, Revision, Technology and Wikis
. 1 Comment

Hi all — there’s an intriguing article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education about McKenzie Wark, a New School professor who has posted his (as yet unpublished) book manuscript online and is taking comments from the general public. He was inspired by both Wikipedia and the academic blog format.

You can check out the article here:
Book 2.0: Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations, by Jeffrey R. Young

And you can check out — and comment on! — Wark’s e-book here:
GAM3R 7H30RY

Are we about to see the line between book authorship (and editing) and blogging erased?

Alan Liu’s draft policy statement on student use of Wikipedia in research

Published
by
Kate
on July 6, 2006
in Pedagogy, Resources and Wikis
. 5 Comments

Yes, sorry, I am posting about Wikipedia again. But I thought I would solicit your thoughts on Alan Liu’s draft policy statement on student use of Wikipedia (via Kairosnews). It has also been picked up by the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus.

What do you think?

WikiPedia tightens its editorial policies… ever so slightly

Published
by
Kate
on June 18, 2006
in Technology and Wikis
. 3 Comments

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?