Wikipedia

I like to stop every month and review, try to distil my thinking in the hope that, as the months go by, I’ll be able to focus more precisely on how to build a better learning environment.

A month ago, Review #1 made 4 key points:

1. Any learning environment needs to handle multiple literacies: text, image, video, sound and their various mixes.
2. We need to keep in mind Downes’ list of required characteristics: open, diverse, autonomous, connected.
3. We will talk a lot about the material of media – code, video, blogs, links – and the content of media – lesson plans, articles, video clips, podcasts – but the effect of the web will influence the success of any online learning environment. The effect is the social psychology created by millions of people using a medium. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the effect of the web is.
4. Learning English is critically important for a lot of people in the world.

The second month began with my first proposed plan. I based it in Facebook despite the fact that FB is not open. Why? The obvious reason is FB’s popularity and familiarity to millions of potential learners. The second reason is that I believe Facebook will have to open up – and there are signs of that happening already. In addition to opening up, one more thing has to happen if FB is to be the base: some kind of advertising revenue sharing system needs to be developed for applications inside Facebook. There are things happening in this area as well.

Ning’s decision to create a FB app is very promising because it helps to solve a bunch of technical and user-interface issues. In addition, we can expect Ning to keep on top of all future UI developments such as Adobe’s AIR, which I think will be necessary by the time an initial learning environment is delivered.

My summary of the system forecast goes like this:

1. Facebook/Ning looks good for now as a base. FB will open up and will figure out some ad revenue sharing system in the next year.
2. AIR will be integrated in the same time and allow better UI and database integration.
3. Basic system ready by end of 2008 - just add users and content.

Wikipedia was also studied because it is a valuable learning resource and it is an inspiration for open content system builders. Content, as design guru John Thackara has recently reminded us, is “something you do - not something you are given by a person in a black T-shirt.” Wiki shows how to open up the creation of content to users. Any learning environment must figure out how to do the same.

Iteration is the key: work in fast cycles that continuously improve based on user commentary. Not trivial, as the programmers like to say. Still, a learning environment can already be envisioned; I’ll use learning English because that is my area of interest. Here goes:

1. FB base, with Ning on top
2. Adobe Air for better UI
3. Service is free, ad-supported through a GoogleAd type system
4. English language content licensed from language providers; redesigned for web interactivity, with styles both trad and innovative
5. Interactive features include:
   

   • » Video chat & conferencing
   • » Blogs with inline tags
   • » Online whiteboards

6. Teachers available or not; if present, they function in ways determined by them and students, both traditional classroom style or other innovations
7. Assessment tools custom developed
8. Revenue sharing with teachers and community content developers

Similar content/ learning systems could and will be developed for any area of interest. Of course, it won’t happen quite like this but this is the second turn and there will several thousand more turns to follow.

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A cartoon done by Greg Williams. Williams uses Wikipedia info as his source material. Click the pic to see it full size.

When I was being trained to teach English at the University of Toronto, one of the instructors went out of her way to warn us against using Wikipedia, or worse, having our students use it. It perhaps goes without saying that she doesn’t use it herself and therefore doesn’t really know what is there. That’s the mental trap that Henry Jenkins was trying to delicately unlock in his recent lecture to educators, which can be read on his blog.

Fortunately, along with Henry, there are teachers and commentators and technologists who are busy working with Wikipedia and some examples of their work will show, I believe, that Wikipedia is a worthy pedagogical tool.

One of the best overviews for educators is Andy Carvin’s post on the PBS Teachers site, learning.now. Andy jumps into Wikipedia and is somewhat embarrassed to find an entry on himself. He can’t resist paraphrasing Groucho’s remark that “he isn’t too sure he wants to use an encyclopedia that has him in it!” But he does use it; he creates an entry for the Chinese activist and blogger, Hao Wu. Wikipedia keeps track of the history of each article; so, not only can you see the original entry written by Andy, but after a dozen other people add their contributions, you can see the current page on Wu. The result? Valuable current info that no single author could write and that, otherwise, would simply not exist.

Carvin’s demo illustrates the way Wikipedia was built up, article by article, to its current size of 2 million English entries. In addition to shorter articles, there are also complete books in its WikiBooks section and the subject range is almost as wide as the main Wiki, from Introduction to Paleoanthroplogy to Raising Chickens.

Whether book or article, it is the vast, sprawling content of Wikipedia that is the main attraction. But the way in which material is shown can also be interesting. One of the features of Wikipedia I didn’t know about is the Simple English Wikipedia, which provides articles on a wide range of topics and uses only simple words and ways of writing. It’s completely free to use, as with anything in Wikipedia. Here’s the entry for Animation:

Animation is a way of making a movie from many unmoving images. The images are put together one after another, and then played at a fast speed to give the appearance of movement. Most animations are played at a speed of sixteen to twenty-four images per second. Each image becomes one frame of the movie. The illusion of movement is caused because of persistence of vision.

(I’ve filtered out the links that some of the words have, links that would encourage new readers of English to explore further.)

Greg Williams has a unique way to display Wikipedia material; he turns selected entries into comic books a sample of which can be seen above. Less artisitic but just as creative are the programmers at the University of Leipzig who have decided to use Wikipedia as their data base; their DBPedia software scans the entire encyclopedia and can instantly tell you any number of things, from which intellectuals were influenced by Nietzsche to which pro tennis players come from Moscow or the names of all the TV sitcoms set in New York City. And to round out this quick sample of folks using Wikipedia to generate their own information, let’s not forget that Google Earth has a special link that ties Wikipedia information to geographical location and might help us locate Nietzsche’s home town or Moscow or NYC.

Another attraction to Wikipedia is the wide variety of ways the content can be accessed. If somehow you happen to be out in the real world and want to know something, you can tap into Wikipedia using SMS on your cell phone. Handy for cell phone addicts, I suppose. But, more realistically, you may be happily seated at home or in the library or office and require only a summary of info on some subject included in Wikipedia. LiteSum will do that for you. I typed in my own name and this came up:

Stephen Bingham was a defense attorney. He was tried and acquitted for his alleged role in Black Panther George Jackson’s attempted escape from San Quentin in 1971.

Litesum’s speed was almost instantaneous - frighteningly fast - and the information is true, it’s just not about me!

The ‘wrong’ info does bring up the issue of inaccuracy in Wikipedia. Because the encyclopedia is open to one and all, changes may appear faster than corrections can be made; some researchers have suggested a color-code system in which disputed areas of info would appear in one color while the agreed facts would appear in another. Whatever the value of this suggestion, it gets us back to George Siemens’ statement that Wikipedia is mostly useful as a source of “quick and dirty info.” Siemens is a supporter of the value of Wiki but he thinks the giant project will turn out to be a temporary stop gap. It will become impossible, Siemens says, for Wikipedia to continue growing and to also control the accuracy of the content. He favors some kind of ‘futurepedia’ that will use Google-type search and some as yet to be developed technology that will automatically and instantaneously locate disparate chunks of texts from different websites and blogs and synthesize them into one article. Wow. The info will emerge from our collective knowledge base.

But not this Christmas. And there’s something people-phobic in George’s implication that a Google algorithm could do it better than a group of interested humans.

I wondered about Litesum’s capability to solve the question that had originally proved to me the capability and speed of Wikipedia. That question was a silly one, you may remember:

What English noun in its plural form has none of the same letters used in its singular version?

It had taken me only 10 minutes on Wikipedia to find the answer: singular, cow / plural, kine. I imagined LiteSum kicking out the answer in nanoseconds. So I typed the question in and the answer immediately appeared:

No results found.

Whew. Still a place for us humans, with the rest of the cows…kine, that is.

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If you’re an antiquarian agriculturalist, you’ll find this question easier to answer than the rest of us:

What English noun in its plural form has none of the same letters used in its singular version?

Not an antiquarian agriculturalist? Not even a fan of trivia from The Lord of the Rings movies, where the word was used? If you want to know the answer, you’ll probably do what I did when I first heard the question: click Wikipedia, where it took me ten minutes to find the answer:

cow is the singular and kine is the plural, antiquarian form

WARNING! Some dastardly wiki-grammarian could be fooling us and providing the wrong answer! I doubt it. As George Siemens says in a recent post:

We use Wikipedia not because it is authoritative, though that argument can be made. We use it instead because we can access it for “quick and dirty” knowledge. …we require different types of information for different purposes. And, for most of my daily quick and dirty information needs, Wikipedia suffices.

Meanwhile, schools and universities rail against the false authority of Wikipedia while their libraries are jammed with dusty print encyclopaedia that are decades out-of-date. Fortunately, no one reads them.

This week and next, I want to explore some of the best thinking about Wikipedia and how we might use it for teaching. This post focuses on the struggle of ideas behind the techniques of wiki-collaboration; next week, some practical ideas.

Wikipedia ain’t perfect – but it is busy. 50 million unique visitors used the online encyclopedia in May 2007, up 70% from the previous year. This makes it the most popular online news and information destination according to Nielsen/NetRatings, with half of Wiki’s traffic coming from Google searches even though Wikipedia display no Google Adwords (data link here). From the beginning in 2000, Wikipedia has been a magnet for keen participants and angry critics but, recently, the sheer size and accelerating growth – it now has almost 2 million articles in English and is 15 times the size of the Encyclopaedia Britannica – seem to have made an impression on the mainstream media. Last month, The New York Times, a bastion of Wiki-bashing, ran a positive story, saying:

Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.

The volunteers behind Wikipedia’s growth have not been lulled into any premature good behavior; recently they provided the world with a list of over 60 errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have, as they say, “been corrected in Wikipedia”. Thanks, I’m sure.

Some educators are trying to understand the notion of Wikipedia-driven homework assignments but, for many web-shocked teachers, the wiki-method of collaboration is still seen as ‘cheating’. To help educators, the MacArthur Foundation in the US has funded a Wikipedia study with Henry Jenkins as principle investigator. Jenkins is presenting some of his early insights at the big annual get-together of educators in St. Louis and, on his blog, he has a draft of his speech, with the encouragingly open title, “What Wikipedia Can Teach us About the New Media Literacies”.

It starts out in a very cautious way; Jenkins has obviously had a number of encounters with angry and defensive teachers who wish the whole wiki-thing would just go away. (And they’re not alone: even Elton John has called for the internet to be shut down!) But Jenkins thinks collaborative, online education is too important to skip and he quotes an op-ed piece written by Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation:

In this new media age, the ability to negotiate and evaluate information online, to recognize manipulation and propaganda and to assimilate ethical values is becoming as basic to education as reading and writing.

I’m sure many teachers will find that hard to swollow but Jenkins pleads the case that Wiki-type participation “…functions as a new form of the hidden curriculum” which represents “a paradigm shift in how we teach English, social science, science, math, and the other schoolroom subjects.” There’s a tone of desperation when he says:

Our ultimate goal is not to convince you to use Wikipedia in your classes, but rather to argue that in a world where many young people are turning to this as a key source for information, educators need to understand what is going on well enough to offer them meaningful advice and guidance.

If we’re telling teachers they need to understand something before they criticize it, we clearly have an uphill climb. But Jenkins has canvassed widely among those who actually work with Wiki rather than those who simply complain about it and the material he presents from these folks is valuable - although it is certauinly not conciliatory toward Wiki-doubters. Wikipedians, Jenkins tells us, don’t see their website as a big collection of articles but as a on-going, people-driven process and he quotes one researcher:

…when you talk to people who are very involved in Wikipedia, it becomes a collection of people who are carrying out a project….Wikipedia was a place where people were coming together to write about the world and figure out what’s true about the world and what kinds of facts are important to know about the world. These are the kinds of things I think students should be doing.

Jenkins sums it up this way:

Wikipedians argue that the question isn’t what knowledge matters but rather what knowledge matters to whom under what circumstances for what purposes.

Exactly. And that, in my opinion, makes the whole thing political, in the sense that, ‘I’m doing this because I think it’s important to me. ’ If teachers are going to use the wiki-world, they are first going to have to prove why something is important and worth doing. Teachers usually assume what’s important has already been established by today’s lesson plan.

For anyone hoping that all the teachers listening to Jenkins in St. Louis will be leaving the hall smiling and planning to wikify their curricula, the speech gets tougher when he expands his world view from Wikipedia to the entire system of networked information the web; Jenkins quotes David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous:

It’s not about who is right and who is wrong. It’s how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest….It’s not whom you report to and who reports to you or how you filter someone else’s experience. It’s how messily you are connected and how thick with meaning are the links… A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.

That passage is positively humming! “A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.”

So much for cautiously pleading the case!

Next week: some practical approaches to the wiki-wonderland.

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