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

Tags: community, web2.0, techforum

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.

I 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.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, wikipedia, virginiatech

If there was ever a doubt that the tools of Web 2.o are dramatically simplifying the way we can embed digital technologies into our classrooms, let me point you towards a neat little project run by a couple of amazing teachers who decided to dabble with the possibilities of a wiki. This wonderful piece of web collaboration was put together by Neil D’Aguiar from Richard Challoner Secondary School in New Maiden, Surrey, UK, and Simon O’Carroll from Holy Trinity Catholic High School in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. It’s a great example of how something as simple as a wiki can be used to develop a sophisticated web project that works simply and easily across the boundaries of time and place. The site can be found at flatplanet.wikispaces.com.

I first met Simon when I was on a teacher exchange to Canada during 2006. We shared a workroom (and occasionally chicken wings) and became quite good mates. As a teacher of Religion, Simon was a relative newbie to the integration of technology into his classroom, but during the year he enrolled into a part-time Computers in the Classroom course. Each day after his course he would come and have a chat to me and ask questions about web technologies, and I really enjoyed our talks. It was fun to watch him get more and more fired up about the uses of ICT in his classroom, and in particular the things that Web 2.0 was making possible. We spoke about blogs and wikis, podcasting and social networking. Simon started to blog regularly, and still has a nice little blog happening at http://mrocarroll.wordpress.com/. He played with a number of different blog engines like Wordpress and Blogger. Then he started to investigate wikis, playing with Wikispaces and PBwiki. He’d come into work each day and tell me about some new discovery he’d made on the web, or ask for my opinion about some new technology. It was really exciting to see the web through his eyes.

Not long after I got back to Australia, Simon wrote to me to tell me about the Flat Planet Project that he started with Neil from the UK. It’s humbling to realise just how easy it can be to start a project like this, because it is was simple as just making contact and asking for a partner, as he did with Neil. It’s such a beautifully simple idea… connect two sets of students from two schools in two countries, give them a common task and provide them with the tools to work across the web. No wonder the site was chosen as the Wikispace of the Month for April! As I look through the pages they have created, you can just tell what a great job the kids did, and from all accounts they thoroughly enjoyed working on it. You can see the positive benefits of this collaboration, and just how much more meaningful this task was because of its authenticity. This is what the new web makes possible!

I wanted to highlight the work done by the kids at Challoner and Trinity, and the great work done by Simon and Neil in leading the kids through this project. Education can be stiflingly conservative at times, so it’s wonderful to see teachers stepping out of their comfort zones and extending both themselves and their kids with projects like this. Good on you Simon, Neil and all the kids who took part!

I’m hoping to interview Simon and Neil very soon on The Virtual Staffroom Podcast, so keep that RSS feed tuned in!

I was a bit horrified at a message I received through my school email account today. It was an internal memo basically saying that we were not to use Wikipedia with the students because it was far too unreliable.

This pessimistic view of Wikipedia was in stark contrast to an excellent podcast I listened to only the day before, titled Introducing Web 2.0 by Tim Wilson. Tim is an educator who is really passionate about the potential of Web 2.0, and has a much more positive outlook on Wikipedia as a learning resource.

I for one don’t agree with most of the criticism leveled at Wikipedia, and would like to think that as a staff we could have had some sort of professional discourse about this issue before we throw the baby out with the bathwater and just say don’t use it. Just like we expect our students to critically assess the resources we place in front of them, I think we also need to critically assess our use of resources like Wikipedia rather than just declare it “bad” and not use it. The issue is not wether Wikipedia might have a few inaccuracies - the issue is how do we teach our students to be astute users of ANY resource, not just Wikipedia.

I think the many benefits of Wikipedia need to be taken into consideration before we make any rash decisions like telling students not to use it.

First of all, I’m going to assume that people understand what a wiki actually is, and that they understand how the articles in a wiki are created. For those that don’t, here is a quick explanation, but basically a wiki is a webpage that is read/write enabled, meaning that users can, if they have the appropriate permissions, edit the page’s content. This enables wiki pages to be a dynamic, constantly-evolving, highly-scalable resource that is kept very current and this is Wikipedia’s biggest strength over static printed resources like traditional encyclopedias.

Wikipedia started life in 2001 as an offshoot of the Nupedia Project, and has grown to become the largest single constantly-updated encyclopedic source on the planet, containing well over 5 million articles on all manner of topics, with over 1.4 million of those in English. Many of these articles are written on extremely niche topics, and in terms of its overall depth, detail and ability to stay up-to-date, Wikipedia has few equal.

The articles in wikipedia are generally started and maintained by people with a vested interest in those particular subject areas. Whenever there are errors or even page-vandalism, these mistakes are generally fixed quickly by the “keepers” of those pages. Teachers I speak to have a huge fixation about the fact that pages can be vandalised, but seem to completely overlook the fact that pages also can be fixed. And that there are way more people who keep them fixed than people who vandalise them.

The problem is that there have been a few recent high profile, and I believe overblown, reports of inaccuracies in Wikipedia. The nature of a wiki - in that they are able to be edited by anyone - is such that inaccuracies can and sometimes do occur. There is no dispute about that. However, those few cases of reported inaccuracies need to be placed in their proper perspective of over 5 million current articles, most of which are highly relevant and pretty darn accurate.

Despite the *potential* for biased, vandalised or just plain wrong information, the overall accuracy levels of Wikipedia remain extremely high for the vast majority of articles it contains, and the fact that it is constantly updated means it can offer content that cannot be found elsewhere. Tim provided an interesting example in his podcast, that the Wikipedia entry on Hurricane Katrina was being written as the hurricane was still happening, that information was being added and updated constantly in real time, and the entry has continued to grow since then. The Encyclopedia Brittanica still doesn’t have an entry for Katrina at all. Surely that sort of immediacy has to be worth something?

It may be true that many (if not most) students (and many adults for that matter) are unable to detect incorrect or misleading information, but this is as equally true of text found in newspapers, magazines, books, TV and other sources as it is of Wikipedia. Even primary sources need to be considered critically. Let’s fact it, history is always written by the winners… Adolf Hitler might be remembered very differently had Germany had won the war. Students should be made aware of the possibility of errors or bias in Wikipedia, just as they need to be aware of errors and bias in all sources. Sure, Wikipedia should certainly not be the only option they have for finding information, but to say it should not be allowed as one of the options is downright foolish. We should be teaching our students to critically evaluate all information they are exposed to and perhaps rather than being a resource we discourage, Wikipedia offers educators the best possible environment in which to teach students about this idea of critical analysis of information. At least kids can approach Wikipedia with an expectation that there may be errors and keep their guard up.

“But my kids don’t use it well, they just plagiarise it without thinking critically” I was told several times today. So, ok, if they don’t use Wikipedia well, teach them to use it properly. I thought that’s what we teachers did. If we claim that some students use information from Wikipedia without thinking or questioning, then does it matter whether the facts were correct in the first place or not? I suspect those same students would use “legitimate” information sources just as indiscriminately, with the only difference being that teachers would mark their finished work on the basis that it was “correct”, and assume (incorrectly) that these students learnt something… the actual amount of real learning that may have taken place may be just as limited regardless of whether the “facts” they submitted were correct or not. In fact, a student submitting work that is factually correct that they still learnt nothing from is, in my opinion, almost a worse prospect that having students submit work where the facts are wrong. At least I can spot those kids!

I’ve personally seen many textbooks where the information is suspect, out-of-date, or just plain wrong. (I taught a senior computing course two years ago where all three of the approved textbooks consistently contradicted each other about basic facts and terminology - all three books were supposedly based in the course syllabus) My personal experiences with the news media suggest that most of what we read in newspapers contains many errors. Any time an author puts pen to paper, he or she exhibits some bias or interpretation of the facts. Wikipedia is probably no better or worse than any of these other sources, and in many cases has information which is probably far more nuanced than most other sources. Remember the people who maintain the articles have a vested interest in making sure they remain as accurate as possible. It’s all about the Wisdom of Crowds.

I mean, make up your own mind. Try this exercise… Pick five subjects in which you consider yourself somewhat of an expert. Look up these subjects in Wikipedia and see how accurate they are, compared to your own knowledge. You’ll soon get a feel for how accurate (or inaccurate) it is (or isn’t).

I’m almost certain that you’ll find the level of information in Wikipedia to be better than you might expect. And the beautiful thing is that if it’s not as good as it could be, you can fix it.