Tag Archives: wikipedia

Ten-year time machine

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how computer technology might change in the next ten years and how that will affect schools. I did a little checking and discovered that the first Pentium processor was introduced ten years ago. PCs then typically came with 16 MB of memory and 1-GB hard drives. That original Pentium had just over 3 million transistors and could perform approximately 100 million instructions per second (MIPS). Today I can buy a PC based on a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor with more than 1 GB of RAM and at least 100 GB of hard disk space. Of course, the computing power available on the average desktop has grown dramatically too. That new Pentium 4 can do approximately 7,000 MIPS and contains 125,000,000 transistors.

It’s interesting to consider Moore’s Law which predicts, depending on the particular formulation you read, that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months. At that rate, ten years will produce almost seven doublings and you can see that Moore’s Law has held up pretty well over the last decade.

How will students and teachers be using technology in ten years? It’s a fool’s errand to speculate, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to say that the computing power available to them will be a couple orders of magnitude greatly than what we have now. Not merely faster, tomorrow’s computers will be smaller and cheaper too. All in all, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.

But how will that powerful new technology change how students and teachers go about their business? I’m reminded of the maxim that says the effects of new technology are usually overestimated in the near term and underestimated in the long term. Despite the hype, most teachers will continue business as usual speaking in their thick digital immigrant accents. (See Prensky’s Overcoming Educators’ Digital Immigrant Accents: A Rebuttal.) In time, however, the digital natives will become the teachers and technology will dramatically change the teaching and learning process. In the meantime, it’s going to take a lot of work for all of us to lose our accents.

TIES Conference here I come

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My blog and wiki workshop at the TIES conference went well. None of the atttendees had a real clear idea what blogs were about when they started. I’d like to think that they left at the end of the day with some good ideas about how blogs and wikis can be used with teachers and students. I talked a lot about RSS and showed them Bloglines, Furl, TeacherHosting.com, WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, TypePad, PubSub, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Wikiepedia, Wikinews, Moodle, and iPodder.org. Whew! I had a blast doing it.

The general sessions begin tomorrow and I’ll try to blog my way through all the ones I attend. There should be abundant wi-fi, but I’m hoping that I won’t have any trouble finding an electrical outlet to sit near. This old PowerBook’s battery ain’t what it used to be. Maybe I’ll grab an iBook instead.

My presentations are Tuesday at 10:00 am and 1:30 pm. I’m not quite done with either one, so it may be a late night or two.

Wikinews project debuts

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From the creators of Wikipedia comes Wikinews, the latest attempt to rethink traditional media and publishing. Like Wikipedia, anyone can contribute to the news articles that are written on the Wikinews site. Is this journalism? I’m not sure that matters to the Wikinews contributors. From their mission statement:

We seek to create a free source of news, where, provided that we can overcome the digital divide, every human being is invited to contribute reports about events large and small, either from direct experience, or summarized from elsewhere. Wikinews is founded on the idea that we want to create something new, rather than destroy something old. It is founded on the belief that we can, together, build a great and unique resource which will enrich the media landscape.

Compiling a wiki-based encyclopedia is daunting enough, but creating a timely, relatively unbiased news source in wiki format will be a huge challenge. It should be noted that some news-like articles have been written for Wikipedia such as the article on the Ukrainian presidential election. The coverage at Wikinews is must less thorough at this point which is not surprising given the much larger audience that Wikipedia has at the moment.

I don’t think the development of Wikinews on its own has much to do with educational technology, but it does suggest that the wiki wave has yet to crest. The potential is certainly there. Imagine social studies students creating their own wiki about current events, science students writing their own textbook, and journalism students moderating and editing a school-wide news wiki. It’s about collaboration, and wikis are about as collaborative as it gets.

Seen at Slashdot.

City-wide wireless

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A couple articles have surfaced in the last week or so about large scale wireless deployments in Seattle and Taipei. These cities may be on the cutting edge, but the wireless revolution is coming to a city or town near you within a few years.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, Speakeasy is planning a WiMAX system that will cover the downtown area using only four basestations with speeds up to 3 Mbps. WiMAX, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access and carries the IEEE 802.16 label, has much greater range than the more common 802.11 systems. WiMAX is getting quite a lot of buzz these days as the up and coming standard that could finally put a wireless network cloud over huge areas.

The Taipei project will use already common 802.11 technology and will require an extensive network of 20,000 basestations. The Yahoo! News article reports the cost of the network will be $70M, but could be profitable in five years.

Whatever the technology, the important message for educators is that universal broadband is coming and we’d better get ready. One of the teachers in my district related a story to me recently about a lesson she was teaching. At one point during the lesson she asked her 4th grade students how fast they could answer two questions: who was the fourth president of the U.S., and how much does a blue whale weigh? The winning times thanks to Google and good keyboarding skills? Four seconds and seven seconds respectively. Do you think these kids relate to information differently than their parents and most of their teachers? Digital immigrant teachers beware, the digital natives aren’t waiting for you to catch up.

Wikipedia critiqued by encyclopedia veteran

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Robert McHenry was once Editor in Chief of Encyclopædia Britannica and his experience brings credibility to his recent critique of Wikipedia. He certainly doesn’t pull any punches:

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

It’s not surprising to find that someone so closely tied to a traditional encyclopedia would find a lot wrong with Wikipedia. I get much the same reaction every time I explain what wikis are all about to a group of teachers, and I’ll admit the concept does seem counterintuitive. McHenry’s chief complaint seems to be that with no one in charge, there’s no way to ensure the accuracy of the information. He also points out that group editing doesn’t always produce the best quality material by pointing to a the Wikipedia article on Alexander Hamilton and highlighting a less than stellar sentence:

All these arguments aside, the article is what might be expected of a high school student, and at that it would be a C paper at best. Yet this article has been “edited” over 150 times. Some of those edits consisted of vandalism, and others were cleanups afterward. But how many Wikipedian editors have read that article and not noticed what I saw on a cursory scan? How long does it take for an article to evolve into a “polished, presentable masterpiece,” or even just into a usable workaday encyclopedia article?

So what does this mean for a classroom teacher who would like to utilize a wiki as an instructional tool? Not much if you’re having students creating their own wikis as a knowledge building tool. Teachers already know what good writing and good learning look like, and I expect they will apply those same standards to their students’ work. If students are using Wikipedia for research, that’s a different story. I never encouraged my students to use any encyclopedia, even the Encyclopædia Britannica, as their primary research tool. The teachers I know and work with push their students to use primary and secondary sources and fall back on encyclopedias for general knowledge only.

Whatever its faults, Wikipedia beats Encyclopædia Britannica hands down in the timeliness department. Comments on Slashdot about McHenry’s article point out that Wikipedia had a thorough article describing the prison scandal at Abu Ghraib in Iraq within days of the news story breaking. However carefully edited, a traditional encyclopedia can never keep up with the real world.

Canonical Wiki list

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I continue to consider how wikis can be used with students and have been second guessing my decision to install Mediawiki, the software that runs the Wikipedia. Not that Mediawiki isn’t powerful software, it’s just that it may be a little too complex. Now that Moodle has a built-in wiki module I’m also thinking that using Moodle’s authentication, and thereby keeping the “bad guys” away from our educational wikis, would ease the concerns of many. In searching for alternative wiki engines, I discovered the so-called canonical list of wiki engines. I knew there were a lot of wiki engines to choose from, but I had no idea that there were that many.

Wikis in the classroom

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I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while since reading something on Will’s blog on the topic. I think wikis would be an interesting way for teachers to get students involved in Web publishing without needing to teach kids any HTML.

The best way to figure out what a wiki is would be to have a look at the mother of all wikis: Wikipedia. In particular, you can look at the wiki entry in the Wikipedia to get a good summary of the features of wikis. It boils down to this: a wiki is a free-for-all Web space where anyone can edit anything. It sounds chaotic, but it turns out that wikis also catalog all changes which means that an act of wiki-vandalism can be corrected easily by rolling back whatever changes were made. So do wikis have any educational use? I think so.

The easiest way to involve students with wikis would be to have them contribute to one of the many wikis that are already out there on the Internet. Wikipedia has articles that would fit with virtually every topic. Math, social studies, science, language arts/literature, and arts students, how about contributing something to an existing article or creating a new one to describe what you’ve learned in the past year? Other similar wikis include:

  • Wikibooks – a free source of textbooks developed by volunteer contributors
  • Wikitravel – a free travel guide

Either of these wikis would be a candidate for student contributions. What a great tool to teach students about the importance of proper citations, careful research, and appropriate writing styles.

The next step might be a classroom wiki where students could collaborate on projects or easily produce a Web site that chronicles their learning. When I was teaching, I would have loved a way for my students to create course-related Web sites without needing a full-blown lesson on HTML or Dreamweaver. These wiki sites are much more organic and free-form. There are literally dozens of free, open-source wiki implementations that could be installed on a school’s Web server. Some allow password-controlled access to the editing options. That might be a good option for a teacher who may be nervous about the wide open nature of a pure wiki.