Category Archives: Wikis

Posts about wikis and their educational uses

Strategies for handling simultaneous edits

Posted on by

Here’s part of an email I received recently:

I’m trying to find a way to work with a wiki with my students. We’re trying to do some collaborative writing type activities. I want them to work in real time in the same document so a wiki seemed perfect. However, because we don’t allow email access I need them to do it without registering as a user of the wiki (the only way I know would require an email address to register). I tried it with several different types of wikis, but every time some peoples’ work was lost. It seemed like when someone saved what they had entered, it deleted what someone else had typed. I thought working in a table might help since they would have a specific place to type and not actually be entering in the same space, but that didn’t show any real improvement. Unfortunately, we don’t have Moodle at this time – maybe next year – since that would probably eliminate our registration problems.

My strategy has alway been to divide up the wiki editing into smaller chunks of content on multiple wiki pages to reduce the chances of editing collisions. It’s far from a perfect solution. Google Docs would work, but the lack of student email accounts would prevent that.

Is there a better solution out there? Is there a wiki engine that support simultaneous edits gracefully? I’m all ears.

Jimbo on Wikipedia reliability

Posted on by

Jimmy Wales joined Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on net@nite recently. It was a pretty standard conversation about Wikipedia that wouldn’t surprise anyone who frequents the site. There were a couple quotes worth noting, however. I’ll keep these handy when I do presentations that mention Wikipedia and the inevitable question about reliability gets asked.

Amber asked how Jimmy would respond to people who say that Wikipedia can’t be trusted (at 31:41 of the recording). He replied:

People do need to approach Wikipedia with some understanding of where it comes from and how to use it. Certainly if you’re a regular user of Wikipedia and you’ve tested it against your other knowledge and against other sources, most people will report it’s actually really pretty good overall. At the same time because it is live editing and anything can be changed at any time you have to be a little cautious. If you read something a little crazy or suspicious you should always check it out. And there are a lot of techniques as an advanced user. You can look in the history. You can look at the discussion page to see if some point has been debated. Check the references at the bottom. You can always tag something. If it sounds suspicious to you, tag it with a tag that says this fact needs a cite or something.

One of Leo’s interns who happens to be a sophomore in high school asked how Jimmy would recommend convincing schools to accept Wikipedia as a trusted source (at 53:02 of the recording). Jimmy’s advice:

Be careful how you use Wikipedia. It really isn’t a trusted source. It really is edited real-time and it could be full of mistakes. That really isn’t the right role for an encyclopedia in the educational process. I think it basically should be fine in schools, it should be acceptable, to add a footnote saying I did a lot of my preliminary research in Wikipedia just to acknowledge where you got a lot of knowledge. But in terms of citing specific facts, you really should go to the sources and look it up there. Because that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. The encyclopedia is supposed to give you the broad overview not be a primary research tool.

This is exactly the advice I give when asked. Perhaps having the quote right from the horse’s mouth will be useful.

Wikipedia adds citations

Posted on by

Seen on digg: Wikipedia has added a feature called “Cite This Article” to its site. The feature appears as a link in the Toolbox section of each page and provides key bibliographic information as well as citations pre-formatted in all of the major forms. Interestingly, they add the following note at the top of each citation page:

Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information — citing an encyclopedia as an important reference in footnotes or bibiliographies may result in censure or a failing grade. Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research.

Here’s an example citation page for the Wikipedia article about basenjis. (I’m a proud basenji owner.)

Introducing the Read/Write Web

Posted on by

I had a great time presenting at NECC on Wednesday. I captured the audio (albeit in a low-quality version) and attached my Keynote slides as an enhanced podcast. I’m also linking to a pure audio MP3 version in case your computer can’t handle AAC-encoded media.

I posted the links for my talk previously, so please have a look there for details.

Download enhanced podcast with Keynote slides: Introducing the Read/Write Web (27.7 MB, 56:32)

Download audio-only MP3: Introducing the Read/Write Web (25.8 MB)

necc, necc06, necc2006, web2.0, wikipedia

Web 2.0 panel at the U.

Posted on by

I had the privilege of participating in a Web 2.0 panel discussion sponsored by the Digital Media Center at the U. of Minnesota recently. My fellow panelists were David Ernst from the College of Education, Shane Nackerud from the U. library, and Clancy Ratliff from the Department of Rhetoric.

Dave introduced the topic, Shane showed and demonstrated UThink, and Clancy covered social bookmarking. My role was to give the professors and others in attendance a glimpse at the kind of work that’s being done in the K–12 world by students who will be theirs very shortly. I showed the Hopkins Moodle site and some student podcasts.

If you’ve got about an hour to kill, you can watch the whole thing as an archived Breeze presentation. (I believe the Flash plug-in is the only requirement to watch it.)

web2.0, uthink, uofmn, umn, breeze

H2O Playlists

Posted on by

I’ll be sitting on the panel for a seminar at the U. of Minnesota in a few weeks discussing Web 2.0. I met recently with my co-panelists and we decided to put our money where our mouths are and use a wiki to organize our presentation and invite input in advance on the topics we plan to cover. (U. of MN login required to edit the wiki.) In the course of our planning discussion I was introduced to H2O Playlist, a wonderful site at Harvard’s Berkman Center For Internet and Society.

According to the site, an H2O Playlist “is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.” Further, the site says that H2O Playlists allow you to:

  • transform traditional syllabi into interactive, global learning tools
  • share the reading lists of world-renowned scholars, organizations, and cultural leaders
  • let interested people subscribe to playlist updates and stay current on their fields
  • promote an exchange of ideas and expertise among professors, students, and researchers
  • communicate and aggregate knowledge — online and offline.

One of the best ways to get to know H2O Playlists is to read the H2O Playlist about H2O Playlists. My co-presenters and I are looking at a Playlist entitled “UDL and Web 2.0: Confronting the Drunk Librarian” for a bevy of useful links about Web 2.0.

I started my own Playlist about ITIL, the set of IT best practices I posted about a while ago.

h2o playlist

If I was still in the classroom…

Posted on by

I used to be a high school teacher. I taught 9th grade physical science, physics, a bit of chemistry, and computer programming. During that time my students did countless labs, solved thousands of equations, and witnessed hundreds of demonstrations. I think I did a pretty good job, but if I was in the same job today I think I’d do things quite a bit differently.

Ward Cunningham‘s original WikiWikiWeb was already in existence when I started teaching in the fall of 1995 although almost no one had ever heard of it. I saw it a few years later, but it never occurred to me at the time that such a beast would be a valuable educational tool. If I was a physics teacher today, my students and I would create our own physics textbook in wiki form. We’d have to do lots of experiments since you can’t put an experiment in your book that you’ve never tried yourself. And we’d have to do lots of calculations to find the ones that are just the right level of difficulty and are interesting to students. And of course we’d need to design demonstrations that illustrate the concepts that we’re trying to explain. (And why not create QuickTime movies of the demos while we’re at it so they can be shared easily.) It would be the students’ chance to learn the physics that’s all around them in skateboarding, video games, and DVD players in a way that would be interesting to them.

There’s no shortage of physics wikibooks; or chemistry, or paleoanthropology, or Spanish for that matter. Perhaps we’d contribute our work to the WikiBooks project too. Maybe I’d find another physics teacher somewhere and we’d have our students collaborate on the project.

How would I assess the students? I’m not sure. (Never let assessment questions ruin a really cool idea.) I do know that I don’t get a letter grade at the end of the term from my boss. I get “graded” by having frequent conversations as we collaborate, solve problems, and celebrate successes. Assuming that I have the students working in groups, I don’t see why a similar arrangement wouldn’t work for my course. I suppose I’d be forced to come up with a letter grade at the end of the term, but I’ll bet each student and I could come to an agreement based on their goals and what they produced as part of their team. Sounds like a great way to spend a year in physics class to me.