Democratizing Innovation

Homebuilt recumbent construction detail 1, originally uploaded by xddorox.

... was a book that I read a few years ago now by Eric Von Hippel. Someone brought up the notion of "democratizing innovation" on Wikiversity the other day which reminded me of how it would make another good reading group, so I've started one for it here: Eric Von Hippel:Democratizing Innovation

Now there's a good chance that I won't be able to participate in this reading group all that much but I like the idea of Reading groups on Wikiversity and I've been involved in creating one before, so I created this one because I think that Reading groups are a great model of a learning project that can work well in the Wikiversity environment. This book appealed to me for such treatment because it may be of some relevance in helping us understand the processes involved in the development of large scale collaborative wikis and, in particular, the development of Wikiversity. I was driven by a desire to establish the reading group in the chance that others over time may find it useful to have structure already in place to discuss this text. This was greatly assisted in this case by the text being freely available in PDF format under a Creative Commons license.

This is one of the features of wiki based Reading groups that I really like, the fact that the group can exist over long periods of time and experience fluctuations in activity but because of the written nature of the discourse it doesn't suffer from the temporality of the face-to-face Reading group which is dependent on synchronous interactions around a specific text. So starting the group now, even though I probably won't actually take it much further at this point, has I think merit in the long term for my own learning process and for Wikiversity.

And this is also what I'm finding particularly interesting lately -- how I'm starting to use Wikiversity as my predominant learning environment, call it a Personal Learning Environment if you have to ... but also possibly in a form that I've not seen discussed in other PLE discourses. The fact that I'm creating projects that I may not at this point have time to participate in immediately, but anticipate that if others do start contributing I will be inspired to participate myself is quite unique I think; it's as if i'm setting myself and others up a space to potentially learn. But I don't consider myself a "teacher, i'm more a technologist, but I am a learner and I want to learn in communities where-ever possible so what better way to facilitate my own learning than by creating a space where a community can form around, in this case, a text?

The other thing is that this is something quite different to what Wikipedia is all about.

While Wikipedia is a great resource for a part of the learning process, it is not so good at being a space for working through the personal or communal process of learning, for journaling, recording, keeping bibliographies, etc and for the kind of free discussion of any idea that comes up. This does happen in Wikipedia, but not really out in the "open" so to speak; mostly these kinds of socratic learning experiences and debates happen in Wikipedia talk pages, where pretty much anything goes, and they are behind the scenes for most readers, and rightly so. Wikipedia is about creating quality encyclopedia articles, not facilitating the spaces where ugly old learning may take place. Ideas in Wikipedia articles need verification, they need sources, written/published sources ... while in Wikiversity, they don't. Ideas, debates and opinions should be out in the open.

I think that Wikiversity may truly be the big sister to it's brother Wikipedia one day and that some of its recent critics will have their words forever quoted from wiki history pages or listservs. I'm working in that direction from now on, from the position of both creating a space for my own individual learning, but also in creating spaces where others can participate along with me, or even without me.

Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society

"The most radical alternative to school would be a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share his current concern with others motivated by the same concern." -- Ivan Illich.

I've started a reading group on the English Wikiversity for discussion of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society; if you're interested in reading and discussing this work then please register an account on Wikiversity (or don't -- you can edit anonymously if you wish). The text is available online through a link from that page, but should also be readily available from most libraries. Each chapter is broken down on the wiki with a space for notes and space for discussions, but being a wiki you may edit and modify this structure as you see fit.

Photo Credits: Empty School by xaxl4

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)

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 :-)