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 It takes a year and half for a textbook to get published, and by the time that happens it is outdated.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

A 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

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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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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(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?)