Art Wolinsky and I went to dinner tonight just outside of Atlantic City, where I’ll be leading a two-day workshop on documentary making for a group of elementary school teachers. During dinner, Art and I talked about what I’ll be presenting tomorrow morning, as well as fun Internet topics such as video blogging, podcasting and Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia in particular, we talked about the hostility that many educators have towards the website, particularly their concerns that it can’t be considered a reliable source. It’s the classic dilemma of a wiki website - because wikis allow any site visitor to edit or add content, you raise the risk of getting content that isn’t up to snuff. And the fact that young and old alike often go to Wikipedia and see that its name ends in -pedia, they assume it’s just like any other encyclopedia and they should take its content as vetted, accurate information, which ain’t always the case.

I explained to Art the community of Wikipedia volunteers known as Wikipedians who have created a system of checks and balances to improve the quality of content and avoid problems with virtual graffiti and inaccuracies. But it’s not a perfect system, so it’s not a huge surprise that a lot of educators just don’t want their students utilizing the site.

I had a flashback; a group of us on the WWWEDU email list had tried to create a “Kidopedia” - an online encyclopedia written entirely by kids - back in 1996, hosted by St. John’s University. It didn’t get very far because all encyclopedia entries were being posted manually by real people; that, and the fact that it was hard to articulate a compelling case as to why kids should be doing this in the first place.

While I understand educators’ concerns about directing kids towards “reliable” reference sources, the more I think about it, the more I think Wikipedia’s flaws actually make it an ideal learning tool for students. That may sound counterintuitive, of course - how can you recommend a tool that you know may not be accurate? Well, that’s precisely the point: when you go to Wikipedia, some entries are better referenced than others. That’s just a basic fact. Some entries will have a scrupulous list of sources cited and a detailed talk page on which Wikipedians debate the accuracy of information presented in order to improve it. Others, though, will have no sources cited and no active talk pages. To me, this presents teachers with an excellent authentic learning activity in which students can demonstrate their skills as scholars.

Here’s a quick scenario. Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups, with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic. Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.

Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it? Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed about horses on the page.

This is where it gets fun. The group of students breaks down the content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their way through the list, they’ll find themselves with two possible outcomes: either they’ll verify that a particular factoid is correct, or they’ll prove that it’s not. Either way, they’ll generate a paper trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or another.

Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry’s talk page and present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections, with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry they’ve verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and referenced - hopefully with multiple sources.

Get enough classrooms doing this, you kill several birds with one stone: Wikipedia’s information gets better, students help give back to the Net by improving the accuracy of an important online resource, and teachers have a way to make lemons into lemonade, turning Wikipedia from a questionable information source to a powerful tool for information literacy.

I can already see it now: an official K-12 Seal of Approval put on Wikipedia entries that have been vetted by students. Wish I were more handy in Photoshop. -andy

I’ll be convening a panel at the NECC conference in a couple of hours; the session will bring together a group of Web pioneering educators to talk about Web-based education’s past, present and future. I’ll post notes about it later; in the meantime, here are the powerpoints we plan to use.

General Panel Powerpoint

Ed Gragert’s Powerpoint

Yvonne Andres’ Powerpoint

I’m pretty annoyed at the Philadelphia convention center’s wireless policy. It seems that free wi-fi is available in public corridors, but not in the session rooms. When you try to go online during a session, you get a message informing vendors that it’ll cost them 250 bucks a laptop to have public wifi in all meeting spaces. What a joke. Given all the sessions that NECC is finally having on blogging, podcasting, wi-fi, etc, it’s an embarrassment that none of us can do this stuff in real-time in so many of the presentation rooms here, unless you’re luck enough to have access to one of the few ethernet cables set up for the presenters themselves. So I’ll have to step out of the session to post this message. What a pain….

Right now I’m sitting in on Tom March’s NECC session. He’s showing off some blogs created in classroom, with students having a more authentic learning experience by interacting with the online public. Quoting Al Rogers, he said, “Don’t surf the Web, serve the Web.” (Reminds me of Stephen Collins’ old battle cry, Give Back to the Net.) Use Web tools to create student excitement alive, embracing authentic activities that can actually make a difference, like running an online news wire about child slavery or the extinction of frog species.

Tom’s now showing how easy it was to buy a domain name for his son and setting up a space for him to create his own content. The site is scottyjensen.com - not sure if anything is live yet. Seems like a no, but maybe by the time you read this it’ll be different.

It’s a nice size crowd here - about 250 people. Not bad for a conference with more than 300 concurrent sessions over the next few days.

As soon as David Weinberger finished his presentation, thousands of NECC attendees streamed out the ballroom to make a run for the buffet tables set up in the reception hall. The reception took place in a long, thin corridor, creating an ugly bottleneck of tote-bag-toting educators eager to scarf down free food laid out on some sponsor’s dime. Meanwhile, a large group of brass-wielding mummers performed parade music, much of which was drowned out by numbers of people calling out to friends amidst the throng of hungry teachers. Sheer chaos. Welcome to yet another NECC.

Patsy and I looked around for a moment or two and decided to bolt. I’ve done nine other NECC receptions: the food quality varies, but it’s usually greasy, and the last thing my jet-lagged stomach needed was an overdose of fried food. So off to the train station we went to head back out to the suburbs. Hobnobbing with friends and peers could wait.

The 2005 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) kicked off in Philadelphia today with an opening keynote by David Weinberger. I haven’t had a chance to write an article about what he said, so he’s a brain dump of all the quotes and ideas I managed to capture. -andy

“I will never live philosopher in chief down - let that never leave this room.”

His presentation, entitled “The Shape of Knowledge,”

“Darn bloggers, you can’t say anything.”

Knowledge is “in pretty rocky shape.” He talked about Dan Rather’s fall from grace; unfortunately the media portrays it as the result of a “blogger hit squad,” he said the issue was that today’s media doesn’t have the authority it once did. “When the authorities don’t even know they’ve lost authority, that’s funny - that’s comedy!”

Jon Stewart: “He’s the only guy on TV capable of blurting out the truth.”

Wikipedia: In a couple of hundred years, people will point to wikipedia as an “epochal event.” If you want to understand what the Internet can be, you should point to Wikipedia. “By all rights it should be the world’s biggest crap magnet…. But in fact, Jimbo Wales has done something remarkable.”

The Greek agora: it’s where affairs of state were decided. “that’s where knowledge got started.”

There’s only one thing we can really know: I think, therefore I am. Descartes. A single sentence that even God couldn’t fool with it.

Four aspects of knowledge. Two of them mirror the nature of reality, while the other measure the nature of political reality.

We assume there’s onlyone knowledge we share. On reality, one knowledge.

Knowledge is neatly organized, like the way we organize things like laundry. Putting it in piles of things that make sense to us.

One of the consequences of this, is as with physical things, we assume that in a perfect knowledge structure that everything will have its place.

Because we doing these knowledge structures, we need experts to do it. “We need experts - it’s tough to do this.”

The experts are going to have a lot of power who help us what’s the right knowledge, what’s the best knowledge.

Dewey: creating a map of knowledge like a map of the local landscape. This ultra rationalism of his forces some constraints: English is put somewhere else than Latin or German or Portuguese or Ural-Altaic or Dravidian, while southeast Asian languages “don’t even get an integer.”

Religion: 88 dewey decimals assigned to Christianity, jews get one, Buddhists and muslims one, etc.

The point is, is that this is NOT a solvable problem. There is not one world so there is not one knowledge.

But digitizing changes everything a whole bunch.

First order: organizing physical things themselves, like photo archives with pencil metadata written on back

Second order: physically separating metadata from the physical objects themselves, like a card catalog representing the knowledge of books

Third order: everything is digital, both objects and metadata. So what can you do now?

Photographic equipment: One thing usually goes into one pile; now you can sort digital cameras in as many places on an e-commerce website as you want.

Messiness is a virtue: hyperlinks can be as messy as you want. If you can’t even count them or follow them all, then you’ve succeeded.

Unknown order. Most of Macy’s is noise: stuff that doesn’t fit you. Imagine getting a wheelbarrow that pulls out everything you can use, you’ve got your own personal store. The owner of info no longer owns the organization of information.

Go to a website shopping for digital cameras and sort the search based on your parameters, not theirs. That’s an enormous release of power, a transfer of power.

Users are contributors. Social labeling: allowing the public to contribute meaning to information, like labeling online photos

Externalized thought. Cites Andy Clark: human beings have always externalized thought, like a physicist requiring a white board in order to think. Now we’re doing the same thing with google. How can you get your kids to memorize the state capitals when they can look it up easily?

If our scaffolding now is bits, what does that mean?

Wikipedia: wiki is not paper. It’s obvious, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind. It’s size is infinite; it’s not limited.

What’s the size of a topic? According to Brittanica, you can only have 32 volumes of knowledge, not 33 - that’d break your back. Artificial constraints to what is considered shared knowledge.

Snip the paper chain, the connection to reality, and build an encyclopedia out of bits, and watch what happens. You get entries like Deep Fried Mars Bar and the Heavy Metal Umlaut. These are somewhat frivolous, perhaps, but we know the size of these topics, and shows what matters to us as a culture, as humans and individuals. This is much closer to the passion of knowledge than what brittanica is.

Linnaeus library: you had to physically have the species to make it official. It’s a map of all species. Linnaeus created a stack of 3×5 cards, laid them out, then made physical maps of them. This makes it tempting to lump things in one category to make life easier.

We have a container model of the mind. It’s an insane idea. We’re doing an internal representation of the world based on what we can store in our heads, or in a book, but they’re both finite.

He then shows Doc Searls’ blog: one of 11 million known and tracked blogs, though I’d guess there are at least double that. Shows his blogroll - all the links he shows to others. Lots of entries, lots of links. Blogs get represented as people writing publicly; but they’re really people in conversations linking to each other. Goes against commercial website philosophy of not linking to outside sources. When you put it all together you get a stinkin’ pile of generosity.

The NY Times: lots of news, lots of links. Except all but for point internally, the rest point to ads. And they have the nerve to call the blogosphere an echo chamber.

Why should you believe Doc Searls? You shouldn’t necessarily, but you should believe the world he lives in more than the NY Times’ world.

Objectivity: the world that is
Subjectivity: the world that matters
Multisubjectivity: it’s not just lots of viewpoints; it’s that you get viewpoints in conversation with each other.

If you want to learn about open source, you won’t find it in Brittanica; instead, go to Doc’s site and follow the links. Go to technorati and see what bloggers are saying. An endless set of links of people conversing with each other. And with all of those people, you’ll get a better sense of what the truth is than reading a single source.

Multi-dispute-ism: when you get into an argument in public, you get hyper rational and try to tear the other person a new one, getting them to admit they’re wrong and you’re right. On the Web, it’s more typical you get a dialogue. It’s a big web - there’s lots of room to disagree and move on. The conversation is never going to be resolved.

When you want a beer, you don’t look for a perfect beer, just a good one. With information gatekeepers, they want knowledge to be perfect, rather than just good enough. With good enough, we barely need gatekeepers. It’s pragmatic: we want the beer. “Pragmatic, local and damn refreshing.”

Knowledge in the age of connected abundance. The solution to the over-abundance of information is more information. Connected abundance. Should we shove content into our kids’ heads? Should we test them as individuals even though they learn socially? Should we imply ambiguity is a failure? Should we insist on being right?

Knowledge is an unending conversation. I mean this absolutely literally. It’s not content that we all decide on. It’s the engagement in the conversation. So we need to understand the context of knowledge - it depends on the discipline. We need to learn how to listen, seek ambiguity. If they’re being too precise, we need to muddy the waters. And we need to love the difference in things.

Conversation, by its very nature, is a paradox. We base differences on identifying what’s common. The simple act of a conversation is miraculous.

Patsy Wang-Iverson hard at work at Research for Better Schools

I’m back in the US after a long haul from Seoul. I flew overnight to San Francisco, where I spent the afternoon with Matthew Schaefer from Compumentor, then went back to the airport for yet another overnight flight to Atlanta. Finally, I caught a flight yesterday morning from Atlanta to Philadelphia for the NECC conference.

Right now I’m over at Research for Better Schools working out of Patsy Wang-Iverson’s office; we’ll head over to the conference center in just a few minutes to register and get our badges and tote bags. Later this afternoon, there will be a reception for international visitors and a first-timers orientation (this is my 10th NECC, so I’ll pass on that one). David Weinberger is doing the opening keynote, which will be quite refreshing for NECC, and then an opening reception. I’m moderating a panel session tomorrow called Celebrating a Decade of the Web in Education; then on Wednesday I’ll get to head home, by way of meetings in New York. Can’t wait to sleep in my own bed again…. -ac