Wikis inEducation

By Kevin Young, USU Brigham City

20th Century Classrooms 21st Century Classrooms 

•Time-based •Outcome-based•Focus on memorization of discrete facts

•Focus on what students KNOW, CAN DO and ARE LIKE after all the details are forgotten

•Lessons focus on lower level of Bloom’s Taxonomy – knowledge, comprehension and application

•Learning is designed on upper levels of Bloom’s – synthesis, analysis and evaluation

•Textbook-driven •Research-driven

•Passive learning •Active learning

•Learners work in isolation – classroom within 4 walls

•Learners work collaboratively with classmates and others around the world – the Global Classroom

•Teacher-centered:  teacher is center of attention and provider of information

•Student-centered:  teacher is facilitator/coach

How do we know which direction to go?

How do we prepare students for an uncertain future?

For something that is time and labor intensive…

There are economies of scale with directed group efforts.

But is this lacking in creativity?

What’s a “wiki?”

For Your Gee-Whiz File…• Wikipedia was launched in 2001• In its first year 20,000 articles were posted• It is now 42 times bigger than the Encyclopaedia

Britannica (with approximately 10 million articles in 253 languages), and viewed 7 billion times every month.– This broke the Yongle Encyclopedia’s 600-year record as

the largest encyclopedia ever (1407-2007).

• Although there are millions of contributors, less than 2% of the users make nearly 75% of the edits

It would take one bee 576 lifetimes to make one cup of honey (1/12 teaspoon per lifetime).

• In 2006 2.39 million bee colonies produced 155 million pounds of honey (average of 65 lbs per colony)

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."

Jimmy Wales

It is inherent in Wikipedia's editing model that while poor information can be added, over time editors reach strong consensus, and quality is anticipated to improve in a form of group learning, so that substandard edits will very rapidly be removed.

A “neutral point of view” is one of its guiding principles and one of its few policies

A House of Chaos?

Favors consensus over credentials—it’s a “faith-based encyclopedia.”

A glorified repository of trivia Realistically unimportant TV hosts, pop

singers etc. are often more prominently featured than historical figures with high global importance

Susceptibility to vandalism: insertion of misinformation, omission of key information, and deliberate inaccuracies.

Is it better to limit knowledge production to recognized experts?

What can a common citizen really contribute?

Should anonymous edits be allowed?

Do wikis represent a threat to academia as we know it?

• “As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”

—Benjamin Franklin

I think we absolutely need another wiki—first of all, simply because Wikipedia lacks credibility, unfortunately. It’s a good starting place, as people say—on some subjects anyway—but it isn’t really what we want out of a reliable reference resource.

Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Citizendium

The tagline for Citizendium: “We are creating the world's most trusted encyclopedia and knowledge base. The general public and experts collaborate, using their real names.”

PC Pro Magazine test of Wikipedia

• In a July 2007 article, PC Pro staff inserted 10 subtle errors into 10 different articles to see how quickly they would be fixed.

• “Only one amendment - to the atomic number of Xenon - stayed up longer than an hour. It seemed the Wikipedians' tools and know-how were just too much for our team.”

Some vandalism is hard to detect

• Most vandalism is corrected extremely quickly—under 5 minutes!

By its nature, subtle misinformation may persist much longer

• Hillary Rodham Clinton was incorrectly listed for 20 months in her Wikipedia biography as valedictorian of her class of 1969 at Wellesley College, in spite of the article being edited 4,800 times during that period. – She did speak at

commencement, which may have led to the error.

“We picked ten more articles for treatment and spread them between five different members of the PC Pro team, so that our IP addresses wouldn't be so easily tracked. We also made our deliberate errors far more subtle than before - changing the launch date of a Centrino chip and the name of Jesse James' mother's first husband, for example.”

“The ridiculously minor Jesse James error was corrected within a minute, and a very slight change to Queen Anne's entry was put right within two. Eight out of the ten errors were corrected within 17 hours.”

A look at the “code”[[Image:Heart-and-lungs.jpg|thumb|right|Blood circulation from

the heart to the lungs.]]===Gas Exchange==='''Oxygen (O2)''' is the most immediate need of every cell and is

carried throughout the body by the blood circulation. Oxygen is used at the cellular level as the final electron acceptor in the electron transport chain (the primary method of generating ATP for cellular reactions). Oxygen is carried in the blood bound to hemoglobin molecules within red blood cells. Hemoglobin binds oxygen when passing through the alveoli of the lungs and releases oxygen in the warmer, more acidic environment of bodily tissues, via simple diffusion.

• It looks like this: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Human_Physiology/Blood_physiology

Wikibooks.org The

Human Physiology wikibook

Organizing your labor force

Should these group members all get the same grade?

How can I contribute to a wiki?

It’s a no-brainer!

Check out the Wikipedia Community Portal for ideas on collaborating with other groups across the world.

This image was submitted to Wikimedia from an Australian high school student who lives in the country and has been contributing photos and written content since 2004.

Like every image in this presentation, it is free to use at the Wikimedia Commons

Here is a brief introduction to help you get started!

Wetpaint.com is just one of MANY free wiki sites. It happens to be my favorite!

There are now over 1,000,000 wikis on Wetpaint, the vast majority of which are basically useless

The most popular wikis on Wetpaint are fan sites—TV shows, book series, movies, and sports teams

Once you have created or joined a wiki the “EasyEdit” button will appear on every page, ready for you to edit!

Once you click “EasyEdit” a text editor toolbar appears. Now you can click anywhere on the page and add text. You can change font, size, color, and indentation, or make a bullet or numbered list. You can also make a word into a hyperlink, add a photo, make a table, or embed a “widget” (such as a video)

From the EasyEdit toolbar, just click on the Photo button. This dialog box will appear:

Just select “Upload New Photo” and browse your computer for the photo you want.

Your photo must be less than 500 KB in size. To shrink your digital photos, I recommend

downloading the free program “Picasa.” You can export pictures at a smaller size without changing the original file.

Even if you find an image online you need to first save it to your computer and then upload it to the site.

Here is what appears when you hit the “widget” button. You can try out the various widgets. I’ll show you how to add a YouTube video. I click the YouTube picture and see:

It is something really different for both you and your students. Expect a learning curve for both.

It can become the focal point of your course Don’t focus just on the shining stars—get

students who “get it” to help those who don’t.

Anticipate chaos. Great way to learn collaboration and content

creation. You can make something meaningful that

extends beyond the classroom.

Slideshare allows you to embed your PowerPoints into a Wetpaint wiki (or other site).

Jing allows you to easily make screen captures, to explain things you are doing on your computer.