Thanks to Gardner Campbell for recommending this short, but fascinating, video about one Wikipedia page transformation over time: Jon Udell: Heavy metal umlaut (temporary link until the original one becomes available again). The evolution from single sentence to accepted full page is a good example of how what Udell calls “a loose federation of worldwide volunteers” can commit to creating an honest and valid record of cultural history.
Why would this be interesting to you? Well, it would be a great example to students of the value of editing to produce good quality writing (and Campbell echoes this idea). What if your students were assigned, alone or in groups, to work in a wiki to create a report or write a paper that showed all their revising history? It would be a terrific record for students who generally write over existing text when revising in a word-processing program and lose those previous passages. In one sense, the wiki space allows us to return to that world of manuscripts and handwritten notes that have thrilled students of textual studies for decades. More importantly, it would give today’s digital students a deeper connection to their writing processes and make them better writers and thinkers.
I’d love to hear about your experiments with wikis in your courses.
Filed under: digital literacy, learning, peer review, student-centered learning, wiki
After an interesting Second Life session yesterday, I heard about VoiceThread, a free technology that lets you create a conversation around a photo or video or text document. You could create a public conversation or have students use it to create a presentation. Feel free to comment on mine, and notice that even though the tool is called voicethread, you can choose to write a text comment [there is no embed code that works for WordPress, so follow the link]:
http://voicethread.com/share/305552/
Filed under: Web 2.0, collaboration, communication, digital literacy, discussion board, peer review
From my SlideShare space, a PPT on the phenomenon of blogging one’s research.
Would be better with narration, of course, and oddly, the links work in this embedded version, but not on SlideShare, itself :-/ ….er, they worked once–the SlideShare link issue is making me crazy. It’s a serious flaw in the service. While it’s great to be able to upload your ppts into a Flash version, what good is it if you can’t use the embedded links? I’ve tried to make a link out of one word or an image, but the transition to Flash still breaks the link.
Maybe I should just open Flash and finally learn how to use that difficult piece of software, myself!
[I'll still make the SlideCast with narration to test that feature.]
Filed under: blogging, peer review, tenure
The last session I attended at the SUNY CIT 2008 conference in May was conducted by three terrifically interesting scholars from the Fashion Institute of Technology, Steven Zucker, Beth Harris, and Eric Feinblatt. [read about my poster presentation on my Second Life blog].
Titled “Whose Technology is it Anyway?” they blew me away with the concept of opening up the source code of our institutions to allow the kinds of collaboration we see in open source software that lets the larger community of software developers, professional and amateur, work to create better tools. The open source movement attempts to harness “the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in” (http://www.opensource.org/).
What would it mean to open the source code of our institutions? Here are a few thoughts on that topic. Pardon the randomness and the thinking out loud:
- first we would have to identify what that concept means in terms of an organization instead of software. I guess we could start with an organizational chart, but those seem to me more like the friendly user interfaces that mask code. What lies beneath the organizational chart?
- what community would we be inviting to join in development? The session moderators suggested students as the primary users of the technology tools we deploy. I agree, but would add faculty who may use a tool for research, in which case, are we also inviting faculty peers in their disciplines, wherever they may be?
- are we inviting chaos and dumbing down a high level of sophistication for a low and common result? That’s the old highbrow/lowbrow argument, as well as the argument against such collaborative enterprises as Wikipedia. Are we inviting the end of expertise in favor of consensus?
I don’t know any of these answers, but I’m fascinated by them, partly because the question of why students need traditional education in a world where so much information and collaboration is just a click away keeps nagging me. So the big question in my mind is “what would students build or modify if they could get their hands on the source code of our institutions?”
Filed under: administration, collaboration, education, open source, peer review
Research Blogging is a blog aggregator. It looks like a blog itself, but actually posts recent posts from researchers who blog about their research. No kidding. Academics who do real, peer-reviewed research write about it in blogs. If you’re thinking that a blog is only a personal journal, you are missing one of the many ways that technology is used today for serious purposes. [Update: Actually, this aggregator lists posts of bloggers who blog about peer-reviewed research that has already been published. It is not a collection of research bloggers posting their own research, as I initially thought.].
There have been a few articles in the news lately about blogging researchers, and we have one here in Intelligence Studies, Kris Wheaton, who recently created a series on the topic “The Changing Nature of the NIE and its Implications for Intelligence.”
What are we going to do with such work? Will this challenge to traditional peer review have an effect on acceptable scholarship, acceptable to tenure committees, that is?
Filed under: blogging, peer review, technology, tenure
Barbara Pittman
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