Podzone Country

Simphone093, originally uploaded by pumicehead.

I've just got back from lovely Riverton, New Zealand ... way down the South Island -- next stop Antarctica. Down there I met Chris Diack an empassioned radio broadcaster who has turned a small caravan into a mobile Low Power FM broadcasting unit that also streams his morning breakfast show out on the internet for rebroadcast to other small town radio stations. Amazing guy, with a great idea and just enough string, chewing gum and the required amount of kiwi determination to pull it off. The podcasting workshop was presented to residents of Riverton to develop content for their site http://www.westernsouthland.co.nz. The handout for the workshop is a resource I've been developing on Audacity on WikiEducator. You can find that here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Using_Audacity .

Wikimedia Quality

Inevitably one of the first queries that arises during conversations about authoring content using wikis is the question of how to ensure quality. Generally the response wanders around the nature of the wiki-way and collaborative development models - ie, the community will create quality in articles over time, vandalism will be removed and, for Wikipedia at least, Neutral Point of View (NPOV) will be adhered to by authors and editors.

The scale and increased importance of a source like Wikipedia though has meant that while this model of creating quality actually works quite well, there is little indication of it within articles themselves besides perhaps taking a look at their history over time and inferring from that at least a level of interest and support for the creation of a quality resource. The Wikimedia foundation though has decided it's time to tackle this growing issue head on, and to enhance the MediaWiki platform and Wikipedia with software to assist in the designation and evaluation of articles for quality. Wikimedia Quality has been created as a portal to discuss current work in this area and to solicit thoughts and feedback from interested parties.

Currently there are two projects that are investigating this area. The first is an extension to the MediaWiki software called FlaggedRevs. The goal of this revision tagging tool is to allow a subset of editors to identify the most recent version of an article that has been checked for vandalism, or even gone through an in-depth review process. The second is called Article Trust and is being undertaken by Luca de Alfaro is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Cruz's research studies the patterns in Wikipedia article histories and his team has created software which colorizes Wikipedia articles according to a value of trust, computed from the reputation of the authors who contributed and edited the text.

I think that also what is important to note in the development of this initiative is how the Wikipedia project is now at a point where resources and time are being applied to tasks around future scalability of this massively significant project. Tackling the quality issue is a great place to start and I will be following it with keen interest.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/criminalintent/339344589/ (CC-By-SA)

What do wiki want?

I'm off to Vancouver, Canada from April 11th - 14th for the Tectonic Shift Think Tank hosted by the Commonwealth of Learning. This event will bring together an international group of educators and technologists to identify the transformative opportunities for MediaWiki and related FLOSS technologies for eLearning. Leigh Blackall from Otago Polytech will be there along with various other and sundry wiki fanatics, tech heads and educators to bash out how the wiki platform, specifically MediaWiki (which runs Wikipedia amongst others) can be transformed to accomodate teaching and learning mo' better. My hastily concocted vision is up here, but I thought i'd extend an invitation for any of the people who actually may read this blog (does anyone read this blog?) to add your vision to my page so that I can present them at the meeting as well. What would you like a wiki to do for you as an educator, as a learner, as a consumer or producer of Open Educational Resources? Let me know and i'll put it on the table and we'll make it happen!

Image: Sedimentary, my dear Watson, by: Sean Stayte

Tags: wikieducator, tectonic shift think tank, COL, Commonwealth of Learning, MediaWiki

Ceci n'est pas une pipe

It seems that even more these days i'm swamped by information that is of interest to me (RSS feeds, blogs, etc) or that i'm obliged to read (a.k.a., email.) It's getting pretty critical for those of us who spend a lot of time in here to be able to sort through this stuff, to slow this flash flood of a data flow down a bit and try to just irrigate the bits of our brains that we're currently into cultivating. To this end I spent a few hours over the weekend looking into Yahoo Pipes which is a really cool idea and one that I suspect will be a dominant geek meme next year as others jump into this space as well (there's already a few). Basically Pipes is a relatively simple GUI for creating aggregate RSS feeds; it's a bit more dynamic than that, there's some neat stuff you can do besides just combine feeds like doing content analysis on a feed for dominant words, or allow user input into a hosted Pipe to create searches across focused data sources.


So why would you need this? Well I suspect that a huge part of the literacy of networked learning will be about acquiring the skills on just how to manage your personal learning by being able to alternate between broad and narrow approaches to information. Search is generally the broadest approach but with the sheer amount of information currently available even the best boolean searches are often thwarted. Which is why establishing narrow, focused approaches to information acquisition through network protocols like RSS, Atom and then creating specific content interactions with applications like Pipes will be crucial for learners as they become more specialized in their subjects and pursuits. The interaction with content and data that the learner engages in will be in creating connections between content and data sources which for a lot of people equates to what learning is all about anyways.

These skills are not easy to explain (I've helped create two tutorials on Boolean in my life and it always confuses students) - i'm still having a hellishly hard time explaining what RSS it to most people and why it's so valuable let alone something like Pipes, but I think that it's time we start developing some basic resources on how to do these things: how to subscribe to a feed, how to tag resources in social bookmarking systems then subscribe to the feed of this tag, etc. We'll need to make all this as simple as, well... looking at a picture of a pipe.

I've got it in the pipe to do so on WikiEducator and Wikiversity as part of the Networked Learning resources ... it's just that with all this stuff to read I get so little time these days :-)