Is Wikipedia a Bad Thing?

Some more on Clay Shirky, this time about Wikipedia (the site loathed by thousands of academics - see image below taken from an essay check sheet).

Wikipedia has now transcended the traditional functions of an encyclopedia. Within minutes of the bombs going off in the London transit system, someone created a Wikipedia page called "7 July 2005 London bombings." The article's first incarnation was five sentences long and attributed the explosions to a power surge in the Underground, one of the early theories floated before the bus bombings was linked to the Underground explosions. The Wikipedia page received more than a thousand edits in its first four hours of existence, as additional news came in; users added numerous pointers to traditional news sources (more symbiosis) and a list of contact numbers for people either trying to track loved ones or simply figuring out how to get home. What was conceived as an open encyclopedia in 2001 has become a general-purpose tool for gathering and distributing information quickly, a use that further cemented Wikipedia in people's minds as a useful reference work. (Shirky 2008: 116-7)

References

Shirky, C. (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press.

Wikis in HE

A wiki is a web site that any user can edit. For this reason, they are sometimes known as read/write web pages.

Typically, a group of people with shared interests and/or common goals participate in the creation and development of web pages and other online documentation on a particular domain of knowledge.

The term wiki is also used to refer to the software that enables online collaboration. Wiki software offers easy-to-use html editing tools that allow users to create web pages, embed images, add hyperlinks and so on.

If you're interested in learning more about wiki software Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and best-known example of a wiki, has an excellent description.

Here are some of the main characteristics of a wiki:

• easy-to-use interface that allows users to upload and edit entries through their web browser;
  
• facility for the originator of a wiki to determine who has edit rights (wikis therefore support both individual and team work);
  
• version control that automatically saves earlier pages (therefore retrievable in the event of a mistake or disagreement).

Finally, here are some useful articles:

Bristow, R. (2005). 'Beyond email: wikis, blogs and other strange beasts'. Ariadne, 42. Accessed 23 January 2008 from: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue42/beyond-email-rpt/intro.html

Pixy Ferris, S. and Wilder, H.(2006) 'Uses and potentials of wikis in the classroom'. Innovate: journal of online education 2(5). Accessed 23 January 2008 from: http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=258

Lamb, B. (2004) 'Wide open spaces: wikis, ready or not'. Educause Review 39(5). Accessed 23 January 2008 from: http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp

Beyond e-moderating

I've just finished doing a course called Beyond e-moderating and need to get together with two other colleagues who've also done it to see if it's worth running at our university.

There's an ambiguity to the title: beyond e-moderating in the sense of 1) more advanced/developed e-moderating or 2) there's more than just discussion boards now.

The course seems to want to keep both possibilities available in tension: more of the same (albeit extended and developed) for some people, other things (inc. blogs and wikis) for others.

On the recent course I was on, some participants expressed a scepticism of blogs and wikis (why though if they're already signed up to the value of online interaction through discussion boards?). Others, however, enjoyed engaging with other tools for online publication and collaboration.

I think it would be interesting to run the course internally but I think I'd like to see more on the use of blogs and wikis (possibly even something on synchronous working - virtual classroom or IM) in the context of the bigger picture of getting students to reflect, publish, give, receive and act on feedback, work together, generate and share ideas collaboratively etc..

I don't think that there's one right tool for all of these kinds of different but overlapping activities.

E-tivity 5.1: Course Report

I'm going to start working on E-tivity 5.1: Course Report here. I'll make a start then re-edit ...

E-tivity 5.1: Course Report
Purpose: to reflect on the value of the course.
Task: Prepare a report, of no more than 500 words, that identifies the key e-moderating skills that you need to develop that will make significant differences to the development of your own participants as online learners. Post your report in the Forum below.
Respond: to the reports of others by identifying helpful perspectives that the participant may have missed.

Areas for further development/reflection:

1) So many virtual spaces: discussion forums, the blogosphere, chat rooms and wikiworld. Affordances. What are their relative merits? What can they each do that the others cannot? My initial thoughts are:

• Blogs: good for getting one to articulate arguments to an imaginary interlocutor (does it matter if a blog has a readership? is presenting ideas to an imagined readership suffucient discipline?); good for linking to relevant sources - repository of references for self as well as sharing; good for day-to-day unfinished reflections that you can return to (either edit or new post); a source document for an essay, report or longer piece of writing. Question: should you assess a blog? Potential for designing out plagiarism quite high? Ownership model: individual.
  
  
  
• Wikis: great for finished products (e.g. e-tivity, group presentation). Spoke to colleague in nursing about her midwifery students: small groups working presentation of physiological changes to women's bodies during pregnancy, each group looking at different trimester. Wikis would be perfect here. More thought needed on discussion that needs to take place around the wiki. Synchronous and/or asynchronous? Ownership model: group/democratic.
  Some research into the use of wikis in education
  
  
• Discussion boards: good for brainstorming, socialisation, development of cohort identity and sense of purpose. Great at idea generation but not so good at creating a finished article. Ownership model: group/democratic.

2) Assessing online: guidelines for academic colleagues. A colleague today asked me how could we encourage staff to use discussion forums without first doing the e-moderating course or similar. Many colleagues are assessing online participation in online forums. I wonder how sophisticated their assessment criteria are. I'll try to track the quote down later, but I remember reading an article that argued that students' learning improves when they come to hold the same understanding of quality as that held by their tutors. One way of doing this is by being more specific about the criteria by which we assess online participation. I'm glad I had the chance to thrash some ideas out about this. However, Rachel's experience makes me think I'm at a really early stage of my reflection on the practicalities.