Metamedia

Scott Leslie's 'Open Educator As DJ' Presentation

Here are some resources from Scott Leslie's wonderful keynote presentation this morning at the 2009 Teaching w/ Technology Idea Exchange.

Some Primary Resources

• His deli.cio.us network
• SOL*R Shareable Online Learning Resources
• and the Wiki Append WordPress plugin that powers it
• The Edtechpost wiki page with extended discussion and links to all the various tools he mentioned during the presentation

Presentation Links

• Prezi presentation 'slides'
• Ustream of presentation

Brian Lamb's "The Urgency of Open Education"

Here is this morning's opening keynote by Brian Lamb from the 2009 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) conference.

The Handbook on Emerging Technologies for Learning

Finally, a little great publicity for George Siemens (@gsiemens) and The Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba, as The Chronicle does an article on their terrific online wiki-based Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning.

Notice. for example, that wonderful chart above on Information Fragmentation and Coherence and how it dovetails with what I call Scarce Infoworld and Abundant InfoWorld - for obvious reasons as we are witnessing the same historical shifts from similar view points.

"According to Wikipedia"

The other day while reading the local newspaper at lunch, I ran across a sentence that began with the words: Wikipedia says...

I was rather taken aback by that, not so much because a print source is citing an online source (or even the ironic realization that Wikipedia itself has a higher standard of citation than the newspaper), but rather that Wikipedia has attained a personification of corporate authorship akin to print encyclopedias; akin to, or perhaps even surpassing that of print.

Do local  (er, pseudo-local) newspapers have articles that say, "According to the Encyclopedia Britannica..." ? I'm sure they do and I'm sure there is a policy about it.

An interesting (if horribly bullet pointed) article in the American Journalism Review takes up this very topic, with feedback from newspaper editors on articles citing Wikipedia.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves...

Some Practical Tips on Teaching Wikis

Some notes from a session last night of teaching students to use wikis, each of which is designed to get them out of the long ingrained habits of individual authorship and more in tune with the wiki way:

Assign them not just to write, but to create links and edit each other

When left to their own devices, each will write their own articles. An article whose history shows only a single author is a failure in a wiki; it is not collaborative.

As a teacher, you may very well simply have to assign them the tasks of making wiki links to the articles of others, including articles inherited from previous students.

Making links to external web sites is common for  students, but wikis grow in strength through frequent internal linking as much as simply adding more text. Assign and encourage internal links and cross editing.

Good enough is good enough

Wikis show the process. That is not only okay, but should be encouraged.

For example, draft articles should not be copied to real articles, but edited in place; wanted pages and links without pages are perfectly okay, and in fact, a useful tool to help indicate what work needs to be done.

The habits of individual authorship, especially in the Humanities, privilege a perfect product. Wikis are not about that.

Consider looking at all the drafts publicly as they go along no matter the state they are in.

Showing process in writing is one of the most important parts of learning to write, as opposed to learning to read critically. Show me T.S. Eliot's drafts or Hemingway's notebooks or Picasso's sketches. Show me how they did it.

Wiki as Collaborative Portfolio

When students go out into the real world, they will have a portfolio of individual work. But the corporate world of today wants and needs people who can collaborate and work effectively in teams.

Every job interviewer will ask questions about that, because technology driven business is and must be highly collaborative to get even the basics done. Adam Smith's dream of a world of small shopkeepers has gone the way of the Tierra del Fuegans.

A wiki is one way that students can show how they can successfully work in a collaborative, team centered way. By showing not just the final product, but the history of their contributions of editing and linking, they can demonstrate -- rather than just talk about -- how they can work in a group and work with current social centered technology.

Also, an important contribution to a wiki may not be the writing of text, but the organizing of text: editing, categorizing, consolidating, rearranging, repurposing, understanding the relationships between disparate resources and how to align them.

And that is much more what management is concerned with in the real world, rather than creation of content de novo.

The Moon Wiki

Very nifty: a wiki with everything about the Earth's Moon.

And who are the sort of people who would be interesting in such a thing?

Our Community: There are three main (=obsessed) contributors including Chuck Wood, a lunar scientist, Mark Tillotson, an engineer and amateur astronomer who has fallen in love with the Moon, and Jim Mosher, a retired physicist. Each has contributed knowledge, hard work and skills, allowing us to create 2055 pages in less than 2 months. Amateur astronomers and professional lunar scientists use and contribute to The-Moon.

This wiki is done on Wikispaces and is a great example of how easy it is to set of a wiki with a designated group of editors. Terrific job.

Edublogs & Teaching with Blogs

Check out the new look at edublogs. A blog isn't just for journaling anymore.

If you click the "10 ways to use your edublog to teach" logo on the front page, you will find a good idea list of various ways to use a blog.

If you are interested in more in depth information about teaching blogging and social software in general, read this report on a course given at Teachers College, Columbia University, entitled Teaching Social Software with Social Software, taught by Ulises Mejias.

The syllabus for the course is especially interesting. Also, do check out the ed&tech blog links he has. Great collection.

Alfred Hitchcock Wiki

Link: Main Page - Alfred Hitchcock DVD Wiki.

Yes, a fun find: the Hitchcock wiki, devoted to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The usual filmography, lists, a discussion board, and gory details of the many DVD releases.

It even has a photo gallery of all the cameos -- even the really difficult ones, such as the one in Rope.

Friday Fun Find: Wikivid

Link: Main page - Wikivid

Wikivid is an interesting idea for a wiki: it is a central repository of links to already existing content rather than content itself. 

And those links are to video tutorials, specifically tutorials about how to use software, at the moment, but I can easily see it expanding to links to all sorts of tutorials and howtos.

Wikivid is a wiki built on the Mediawiki platform, so it is - if not easy to use - at least well known. The emphasis is on organizing and describing things.  Currently it is in alpha state, but of course since it is just wiki software, it works fine as I can tell.

Screencasts of How to Set up a Wikispace

I've been playing with Screencast-O-Matic and giving some feedback to the developers. Getting to like it more and more.

And the feedback from them has been tremendous: so if you try it, definitely send them feedback via the Leave Feedback button.

One of the suggestions I made was to have a countdown to start the full screen capture, so you would have a few seconds to pull up the window you wished to start the show with. They added it to the product in a few hours. Now that's listening to your customers.

Here are two samples of a short and long version of the same topic:

• How to Set Up a Wiki in Wikispaces for a class (short 3 minute version)
• and the full 9 minute version

Both of them are live recordings with no editing. That is hard to do. So forgive some of the keyboard clacking and those ubiquitous ums.

While making those screencasts, I devised a few tricks to help make the movies more attractive and clear, which you have to do as you go along, since you cannot edit it, afterwards.

So, here are some Tips for using Screen-O-Matic:

• I made some basic Powerpoint slides to provide a introductory title and roadmap (I used Slideshare in full screen mode)
• I removed all my browser extraneous tool bars from view to reduce the screen clutter
• I use the Firefox plugin Adblock Plus to block ads, which are very distracting when you are trying to teach someone how to use a site
• I used different browser windows instead of tabs to reduce clutter -- and I found it makes it easy on the eyes to have the windows pop up from the bottom where you don't notice them anyway
• I pre-opened every site I was going to use to the page I wanted
• I made the long one first, full of detail and verbose, then pared it down to the basics
• How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, practice, practice...

In addition to links, you can also embed the screencasts, in varying sizes of 400, 600 and 800 pixels wide.

Here is the long version embedded below at 400 pixels wide (so it will bump the screen here a little on the right I am sure).