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 Jenny Levine) Great essay by Kevin Hale on why RSS is becoming even more important as search engines like Google get increasingly ineffective because of all sorts of spammers that are devaluing search results. I’ve noticed this of late as well, that a lot of the results that come up toward the top in Google searches lead to ad filled link catalogs. Couple that with the crud that seems to be infesting Blogger and you get the bigger picture.

RSS is just the good stuff, however, and that’s the power. If you can find some trusted sources in the areas that you’re interested in, you can find good information and have it come to you via RSS. And more and more, the evolving alternative to search seems to be rooted in the efforts to build folksonomies via social linking and in following the feeds of those folksonomies. So now you find content in even more effective ways, by subscribing, NOT searching. That’s a shift, huh?

Interestingly, Kevin notes that in marketing new products, he’s been more successful adding them to del.icio.us than waiting for hits to come from Google.

Every time something went up on the site that I felt would be good enough for a wider audience, I added it to my Del.icio.us account with the appropriate tags and descriptions. Our goal was to try and get a feature on del.icio.us/popular by the end of July and to our surprise, we accomplished it in less than a week. After two weeks of diligent posting and tagging, Google gave us a little over 50 referrals while Del.icio.us gave us over 700.

That’s pretty amazing if you think of it. The community identifying value in content rather than the algorithm and doing a better job at it. Coupling that with RSS where the harvests of that “intelligence” come right to your door makes for a pretty powerful tool.

Good stuff.

This has been a pretty slow blogging week, primarily becuase yesterday we kicked off a full year pilot of about 35 tablet PCs in the hands of teachers from every discipline at our school. I ran a two-hour training that was one of the most fun sessions I’ve ever done primarily because of the kick of having the tablet and being able to walk around the room using the stylus to navigate it, everything being projected via wireless connection to a screen at the front of the room. Amazingly cool technology, I think.

I haven’t written too much about my tablet use, but I can’t imagine life without one at this point. I’ve had my Toshiba M200 for about a year and it’s become attached to me, literally. Ironically, Josh Marshall posted about his use of a tablet yesterday and I think it’s a great overview of the tool.

The best part is that today in the lunchroom a actually heard one of the pilot teachers say “Yeah, and then after I write all the notes on my presentation I can just throw it on my blog so the kids will have it.”

Chills…

Last year I wrote that the Internet Law Program at Harvard was “one of the most profound learning experiences of my life” which is why I’m heading back to Cambridge next week for this year’s gathering. I’m really psyched to see and hear Lawrence Lessig again as he’s become one of my true heroes (right up there with Ernie Banks.) And his supporting cast is pretty impressive as well.

The really incredible part is that I’ve been asked to “host” one of the Thursday dinners and come up with a theme that program participants can choose to attend and discuss. I decided to title mine “Open Content: The Shifting Nature of Originality in the Collaborative Commons.” I figured hey, this is iLaw, and high-fallutin titles will probably work. On the other hand, now I’m thinking that I’ll either be eating alone or the conversation will be so far over my head that I won’t be have anything to add.

But it is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, something that I actually tried to broach at an administrative team meeting here this week. I haven’t totally wrapped my brain around it yet, (in fact it’s still very murky) but it feels like there’s a big change we’re going to have to make regarding how we think about the content our students create. Something that deals with the fact that more and more stuff will become collaboratively constructed online, and that we’re going to continue to gain more and more access to ideas and observations, and that somehow all of that is going to shift our traditional labels of what it means to be creative and original. Something like that. All thoughts welcomed, as usual, and please let me know if you’ll be traveling to Hah-vaad next week.
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THE Journal this month has an article I wrote about my Secret Life of Bees blog if anyone might be interested. It seems hard to believe that it’s been almost three years now since that project. Time flies…
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I got an e-mail from a teacher who had just done a Weblog training using Blogger, and the issue of the “Next Blog” button in the top right corner came up, as in what if students click through to some inappropriate site? Oy. If you haven’t tried this of late, you need to. Start here at a test site I put up a couple of months ago and click through to the 10 random “Next Blog” sites that come up. Here’s what I got:

#1. A page full of the same candlemaking link intended only to raise the Google ranking of the link owner.
#2. Another one, this time related to child support.
#3. Another one for sun screen protection.
#4. A site filled with picture of nurse porn.
#5. A personal blog written in Portugese (I think.)
#6. A link site for debt consolidation.
#7. A student blog (believe it or not!)
#8. A blog on quantum algorithms.
#9. A link site for golden retreiver pictures (???)
#10. A political blog.

So, six of the ten sites were either spam or porn. I’m sure your mileage may vary, but the point is pretty clear. Just the chance that a student might click through to a pornography site is enough to scratch Blogger from the list of blogging options. So, what to do? Here are a few options:

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Over at ETI, Tom is writing about the future of blogging in preparation for our NECC panel in a couple of weeks. I’m cross posting this back over there in response.

My take on the future of blogging differs from Tom’s in some respects. Specifically, I don’t agree that the practice of reading and writing in blogs will remain unchanged in 10 years. If fact, I would doubt that blogs in their current iteration will be around in 10 years. To compare blogs to e-mail is, I think, to say that, like e-mail, blogging has only one fairly restrictive use. I don’t think that’s the case. In fact, Tom points out correctly that blogs have already evolved from basic link lists with little annotation to a more complex form of exposition, which is, ironically, a change he’s been fighting against and I’ve been fighting for.

I think that evolution will continue as more and more communication goes online in more and more transparent ways. In fact, I would argue that in 10 years, especially in educational circles, exposition will be taught in what is currently blog form. I sincerely doubt that our current process of exchanging paper will still be around. I also believe that the social, collaborative aspects of blogging will also be subsumed into the writing process we teach. It will move writing as product to writing as conversation or contribution. Because of blogging, writing will take on more meaningful outcomes.

This type of blog work will become part of a much more complex and diverse learning environment which combines blog, e-portfolio, community and more. I think Elgg comes close to that vision, though I wonder what level of autonomy over these spaces students will be afforded. (That’ll take a few more decades…) And in similar ways, individual blogging will cede to more community aggregated forms. (RSS is already beginning to render individual Websites fairly meaningless.) Again, the emphasis will continue to move toward dialogue and conversation and away from monologue.

So, once again, to me this comes down to a distinction between form and function. To me, the form will not be sustainable, but the function, the blogging will become an integral part of what we do.

(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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Konrad Glogowski has a post up titled “Grading Conversations” where he writes:

I think that student bloggers should be recognized for writing as part of a larger community of inquirers. Some of my most successful writers are those who are aware of what their friends are writing about and who participate in conversations with other bloggers in their class. This is an important part of knowledge- and community-building, especially when (as in my class) students investigate and write about related ideas. When the whole class is engaged in investigating human rights, for example, the interactions that occur among bloggers can have a strong impact on individual writers and the communal sense of knowledge-building. Students quickly become aware that they are all co-constructing knowledge and begin to spend a lot of time commenting on other blogs and other entries. When I mark their contributions, a part of their grade is given for showing that they are an integral part of the blogosphere and not just an isolated writer.

I just think that is so good, and so different from the ways in which most teachers approach assessment. I mean many of us give grades for something called “class participation,” but that is much, much different from “knowledge construction participation.” We’re saying to our students that while it’s important for them to share their ideas with the rest of us, it’s equally (if not more) important to be willing to contribute and test those ideas in the context of the class community. That they need to stop giving “answers” (which suggest the discussion is over) and start contributing insights and experiences and questions (which suggests the discussion continues.)

We need to stop thinking in terms of assessing answers and start thinking about how we assess the contributions our students make to the conversations about learning that are happening in our classrooms. It’s not going to be an easy shift, because it’s much less concrete compared to what the system now calls for. But it’s great to see that teachers are starting to move in that direction, and that they’re willing to enter the conversation for themselves.

Sometime around four years ago this week, I started blogging. And I must say, it’s been an amazing four years. I know I have said this before, but aside from my wonderful wife and my two bratty kids, I can’t think of much that has taught me more and changed me more than this regular practice of reading, writing and learning. To many, that probably sounds like a sad commentary on my life, but those who know me know I consider it a blessing, if there is such a thing. My name is Will, and I’m a blogger.

Alan has been asking for “Blog-Ha” moments and here’s mine. Like most, it’s not a moment as much as a series of moments that somehow made certain synapses fire in such an order that blogs struck a major chord. And the first moment that I can remember was at Metafilter. I’m not sure I even knew what I was looking at when I first saw it, but what I realized was that here was a webpage that people were having conversations on. Not a news group. A webpage. What a concept. In the process of reading Metafilter posts, I came across blogs. Not many, but I remember
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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.

So here’s a question…if you were a teacher and you wanted to introduce your students to the joys of blogging, and you wanted to do it by having them read some blogs first, where would you point them?

So long-time edbloggers Tim Lauer and Tom Hoffman, both of whom will be on the panel I’m leading at NECC in a few weeks, scored the big time this week when the audio of their presentation “Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool” at the O’Reilly E-Tech 2005 Conference earlier this year got put on the list at IT Converstations, my favorite source of interesting podcasts. It’s a 15-minute or so talk about how the two of them created a locally run wiki solution for Tim’s elementary school kids in Portland. Now I have to admit, much of it went over my head, but the creativity and fun that the two of them are having with this is hard to miss…and that’s the important part.

Now all we need is a more happy looking Tom…
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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…