Category: Wikis

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Talking Heads

The Royal Treatment is a video forum put together by New York City-based educator, Ken Royal, on behalf of Scholastic in the US.  Ken uses a couple of computers both running Skype simultaneously (similar to Leo Laporte’s Skypeasaurus) to run two full screen video inputs from two different interviewees.  He then videotapes the whole thing and publishes the chat.

I had the pleasure last night of being part of the panel with Thialand-based educator Jeff Utecht to talk about wikis. I’m glad to have been able to contribute, but Jeff is really the wiki-god, and he certainly had lots of good stuff to say about them.  We talked about how wikis get used in the classroom and about the importance of a “wiki way of working”. To me, wikis are symbolic of the changes taking place in society and the more collaborative, more iterative nature of creativity demanded these days.

Anyway, here’s the video from last night.  It was nice to be sharing with Jeff and Ken.

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Learning. Your time starts… now!

I was invited by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach to contribute some thoughts to a session at the Texas Tech Forum today in Austin TX. It was very nice to be asked, especially when I found that I was in the company of such respected educators as Terry Freedman and Emily Kornblut. The topic for conversation was Virtual Communities for Professional Development and Growth, where all three of us had been invited to share a few minutes talking about how we use virtual networks to support our own learning.

Unfortunately, my audio stream was largely unusable and we had to abandon it before I really got started. Seems that the trans-Pacific bandwidth gods were not smiling this morning (or was it David Jakes using all the bandwidth in the next room playing with Google Earth? Hmm, we’ll never know)

Nevertheless, here’s the brief outline of what I would have said, or something very much like it…

If you accept that Learning is a Conversation, and that some of the most powerful learning can take place in the process of conversing and exchanging ideas with others, then setting up ways to have as many of these conversations as possible seems like an obvious thing to do.

How many would agree that some of the most powerful “take aways” from many conference events come from not just what you hear from the stage, but from the informal conversations you have over lunch, in the corridors, etc? There is great power in those conversations. It might be easy to think that the people on the stage at conferences have the knowledge and that if we simply listen to them we will get wisdom, but the truth is that sometimes it just doesn’t work like that, and even if it does, most of those ideas gather far more momentum once we start to internalise them through further conversation with others. Ideas beget ideas, one thing leads to another, and you often find some of the best, most useful ideas come to you not from what was said by a speaker, but from things that came to to you as a result of further conversation about what was said.  (by the way, the same logic applies in classrooms too!)

So if we accept that conversations are powerful learning tools, then how can we encourage more of these conversations?

If we limit our notion of learning to the “official” channel – the teacher, the textbook, the syllabus – we miss so much. Yes, learning happens at school, but what about outside school? Yes, learning happens in the classroom, but what about outside the classroom? Yes, learning happens in the act of “being taught”, but what about when we are not “being taught”?

Our schools system implies that when we ring the bell to signal the start of a class, we are really saying that the learning starts… wait for it… now!  And at the end of the lesson we ring it again to say the learning now stops. Ok, school’s over, you can all stop learning now. Until tomorrow.

Is creativity important in education? If you’re not sure, I suggest you watch the video by Sir Ken Robinson, or read the report “Are they really ready for work?” Yes, I think creativity is important. So, if we acknowledge that creativity in education is important, then how can we teach kids to be creative if we continue to focus on just regurgitating standard answers to standard questions, year after year. Because if it’s only about learning pre-defined content then you don’t need creativity, and you don’t need conversation. Learning in messy and there is no point extending our thinking into new and creative areas if we aren’t committed to that notion, because that just muddies up all those nice clean facts we have to remember.

Papert said that the one really valuable skill for a 21st century learner is that of being able to “learn to learn”… To be able not just to know the answers to what you were taught in school, but to know how to find the answers to those things you were not taught in school.

So how do virtual communities fit into this? They are an obvious and convenient way of extending conversations with other likeminded people, no matter where (or when) in the world they might be. Once you establish the right communities – ones that work well for you – you have an amazing brains-trust to tap into, to bounce ideas off, to share with, to give to, to take from, to argue with, to feel validated by, to learn from, to teach to… once established, you have a powerful 24/7/365 mechanism for generating creative thoughts.

Getting to the point, the tools I personally use to generate my own personal learning networks – my own virtual communities – consist of…

  • Email lists – yep, you heard me… good old fashioned, asyncronous email lists. They still have a useful place and for many people are a great introduction to online communities.
  • Web Forums – same thought as email lists. In fact forums are really just email lists without the email. Great for specific topics and threaded discussions that gets archived.
  • Blogs – wonderful public and private thinking space. You really have to formulate your ideas in clearer ways in order to write them down, so blogs are great for really figuring out your stance on things. And the fact that blogs become so interlinked, with commenting and cross-reading between other blogs. They are like “idea pollination”, only without the allergic reaction.
  • Wikis – great for collaboration, which is another way of saying conversation really. Great for group projects, great for post conference wrapups (extending the conversation). Just great.
  • Podcasts – some of my most powerful learning takes place through listening to podcasts. And when I decided to start my own podcast and began to have real conversations with people… wow, that certainly turbocharges the learning experience.
  • Twitter – so much has been written about Twitter recently. It’s live, it’s immediate, it’s awesome, but you won’t get it until you try it.
  • Skype – My favourite tool for conversation. It encourages quality conversation like no other.
  • Ning – Sometimes the fact that there are so many Ning communities makes it hard to focus my attention in the one place, but certainly a great tool for building communities around a central theme.

So there you have it. Some of my favourite virtual community tools and some of the rationale behind why I use them. At the end of it all, I think belonging to the right combination of communities has the potential to improve what you do… not by a small amount, but by an exponential factor. Tapping into communities increases the quality of your thinking – not by 5-10%, but rather by doubling or tripling your creative flow and understanding.

If you doubt it, just try it and see. Then leave a comment and we can have a conversation about it 😉

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Commanding The Tide To Stay Out

That old argument about the validity of Wikipedia as a tool for research raised its head again at school this week when our library staff asked that a link to Wikipedia be removed from the “Library Links” section of our school intranet. Naturally, I questioned this and was politely informed that although the library staff think Wikipedia probably has a use, that use was not as a legitimate research tool. They preferred to disassociate the school library from Wikipedia, and only endorse “real” encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book. It seems that real encyclopedias are not free and require a login.

To avoid an argument I removed it. (Besides, the kids would still use it anyway whether it was linked from the library links list or not.) But it made me disappointed to realise just how much some of us still don’t “get it”, to say nothing of how embarrassing it is that I work at a school where the library wants to stick its head in the sand about tools like Wikipedia and pretend they don’t exist. I sent a reply back explaining that I was disappointed we didn’t want to acknowledge Wikipedia as a useful research option. I tried to point out that, like all tools for research, wikipedia need to be validated and cross-checked against other references. I also tried to make the point that kids WILL use wikipedia to gather information on a wide range of topics whether the library endorses it or not, and simply removing it from the list of links won’t change that, and that perhaps we should be teaching kids to use tools like this properly and not just avoiding them or pretending they don’t exist.

I promptly got a reply back, basically saying we are the library and they are our toys, so just remove the link anyway.

Feeling somewhat frustrated, I put a note out to my colleagues on the OzTeachers list asking for their experiences with Wikipedia in schools. Perhaps it was me that was wrong. Maybe I was the one who didn’t “get it”. The replies flooded back in over the next couple of hours with a series of overwhelmingly positive responses about how Wikipedia was used in school across Australia. I was pleased to see that so many educators (and librarians) are embracing this tool and using is as a means to teach better research skills. I was sent an excellent link to the Education Department of WA’s website where they not only tolerated Wikipedia, they are actually promoting its use. You can read the mailing list’s responses at the OZTeachers Archives… just scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Virginia Tech on WikipediaI was particularly struck by a post by Peter Ruwoldt, who suggested I take a look at the Wikipedia entry for the recent Virginia Tech Massacre, and in particular to cross check the creation date for the article with the date of the actual event. It was no real surprise to discover that both the event and the first Wikipedia entry about the event happened on the same date, April 16, 2007… in other words, the article was being written as the event unfolded. What I found really fascinating as I searched for the article creation date was to browse through the history of page revisions to see how the article actually grew minute by minute.

It began with a very simple line, “The Virigina Tech shooting incident occurred on April 16th, 2007. One person has been reported to be slain.” Three minutes later, it was amended to read “The Virginia Tech shooting incident occurred on April 16, 2007. One person has been reported to be slain and one person is reported wounded.” The next revision came 2 minutes later and added a citation to a newspaper report. 7 minutes later, someone corrected a minor grammatical error. The article continued to grow, with over 100 edits in the next few hours, each one improving and correcting the one before it. There was a clearly evident group of people whose names keep appearing in the edit history list, demonstrating how people emerge to become the “keepers” of these articles. This is a completely organic process…. No one is elected to be in charge, no one has to hold a meeting to delegate responsibility. It just works.

The article has now been edited over 500 times, with each revision building on what has gone before it. The quality of the writing and the way it explains the incident seem to be excellent quality… at least of the standard that one would expect in a “real” encyclopedia.

This is what people who are critical of wikis don’t seem to get… Their assumption is that articles are spuriously written by people wishing to cause trouble by spreading misinformation. They don’t seem to get that these things are written by large groups of people who, through a process of self governance and wisdom-of-crowds, manage to refine and evolve some very good articles through a process of constant iteration. By the time this article has come to its current revision, many hundreds of people have contributed to it, and thousands of eyes have looked at it. How long do you think a spurious edit or a vandalised paragraph would last? Do you really think that the volunteer army that helped create this information would stand idly by and allow it to be ruined?

We live in a connected world, where peer-to-peer networks of people and information have forever changed the top-down approach that characterised the pre-web world. We can fight it, or we can embrace it. The fact is that no matter how much you might want to stand by the ocean and command the tide not to come in, it will come in anyway. The sooner we all “get that”, the better.

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