Blog Juice for Educational Technology

I had a great time presenting at NECC on Wednesday. I captured the audio (albeit in a low-quality version) and attached my Keynote slides as an enhanced podcast. I’m also linking to a pure audio MP3 version in case your computer can’t handle AAC-encoded media.
I posted the links for my talk previously, so please have […]

Alan Liu posted the following on Humanist. I asked his permission to repost it here, and he consented. I'll post some thoughts of my own as a response to this post. For now, I'd offer that Dr. Liu's post seems to strike a good balance; I wonder how students would react to this statement.

Subject: Request for Comment: draft policy statement on student use of Wikipedia

Dear Willard,

This message is a request for comment (the humanities version of a RFC). 2006 appears to be the year that undergraduate students discovered Wikipedia in a big way. My colleagues and I have been seeing an increasing number of papers that use Wikipedia inappropriately as the sole or primary reference. For example, I just read a paper about the relation between Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism in which every reference was to the Wikipedia articles on those topics with no awareness that there was any need to read a primary work or even a critical work. After writing comments to a number of students on this topic, I set to work on a general policy statement addressed to the student that might be shared among my local community of scholars (see draft below). I thought such a statement might be of general use. I welcome any suggestions from, or discussion by, the Humanist community as well as pointers to any similar statements that
may exist. (Still to do is a one-paragraph version of such a statement suitable for inclusion in a course syllabus.)

–Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara

TO THE STUDENT: APPROPRIATE USE OF WIKIPEDIA

In recent years, Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) has become one of the most important and useful resources on the Internet. Created by an open community of authors (anyone can contribute, edit, or correct articles), it has become a powerful resource for researchers to consult alongside other
established library and online resources. As in the case of all tools, however, its value is a function of appropriateness. In the case of college-level essays or research papers, students should keep in mind the following two limitations, one applying to all encyclopedias, and the other specifically to Wikipedia:

(1) As in the case of any encyclopedia, Wikipedia is not appropriate as the primary or sole reference for anything that is central to an argument, complex, or controversial. "Central to an argument" means that the topic in question is crucial for the paper. (For example, a paper
_about_ Shakespeare or postmodernism cannot rely on an encyclopedia article on those topics.) "Complex" means anything requiring analysis, critical thought, or evaluation. (For example, it is not persuasive to cite an encyclopedia on "spirituality.") "Controversial" means anything that
requires listening to the original voices in a debate because no consensus or conventional view has yet emerged. (For example, cite an encyclopedia on the historical facts underlying a recent political election, but not on themeaning or trends indicated by that election.) These limitations are due to the fact that encyclopedia articles are second- or third-hand summaries. They are excellent starting points for learning about something. But a college-level research paper or critical essay needs to consult directly the articles, books, or other sources mentioned by an encyclopedia article and use those as the reference. The best such sources are those that have been refereed ("peer-reviewed" by other scholars before acceptance for publication, which is the case for most scholarly journals and books) or, in the case of current events, journalistic or other resources that are relatively authoritative in their field.

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Are wikis still cool, now that their novelty has worn off? I guess so–the hype just won’t go away. Wikis are the future of the net. It’s Web 2.0. It’s the electric toothpick and Ferrari’s answer to the RV. It’s how the next presidential election will be almost won (but a good book deal will result). It’s a lean, mean, suicite machine for researchers the world over. Even loudmouth luddites are thinking twice about slamming Wikipedia in their Joyce classes. Fortunately, a wiki is only as good as its contributing members, the wisdom of its crowds…Ten million wikipedians can’t be wrong, can they? I mean, look how great the Neitzsche page is! And that Thoreau never looked so useful! That herd mentality is good for something after all, eh?

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The Chronical of Education posted a note today describing how Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, says that he wants to get the message out to college students letting them know that they shouldn’t use Wiki either for class projects or for serious research. Speaking at a conference held at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday called “The Hyperlinked Society,” Mr. Wales said that he gets a number of e-mails each week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic trouble. However, he said that he has no sympathy for their misfortune, noting that he thinks to himself: “For God sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the [Wiki] encyclopedia.”

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If you’re a true Wikipedian or merely a fan of the world’s largest encyclopedia, you’ll want to have a listen to this week’s episode of FLOSS Weekly with Chris DiBona and Leo Laporte. They interview Jimmy Wales, and he provides some interesting insights into the workings of Wikipedia. Good stuff for a commute.
Technorati Tags: jimmy […]

Ummm, hope ya like code…I could NOT figure out how to fix this so that the html didn't show up.

What follows are my notes on the Next/Text meeting for Rhetoric and Composition. At first I was really vigilant about preceding people's comments with their names or initials, you know, so they'd get credit for what they said. But then things got so rapid-fire that I got lazy about it. These notes represent what we, as a group, said, and each of us made contributions: myself, Cheryl Ball, Cindy Selfe, Daniel Andersen, David Blakesley, David Goodwin, Geoffrey Sirc, Janice Walker, Jeff Rice, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Karl Stolley, Kim White, Michael Day, Victor Vitanza, and Virginia Kuhn. To give a little background, Next/Text is one of the projects of the Institute for the Future of the Book, which is part of the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Next/Text is focused on classroom textbooks in particular. Our meeting was devoted to imagining how we in rhetoric and composition would go about creating a completely new electronic textbook — new, as opposed to CD-ROM companions to print textbooks: your basic linear, text-with-images, PDF-esque, “take a book from the tradition of print, digitize it, and smack it up on the Web.”

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Okay, I made up the part about illegal aliens. But, here’s a report that claims “Wal-mart lobbyists have successfully waged a war against a fair viewpoint on Wikipedia’s Wal-mart page.” Apparently, hundreds of anonymous users are taking it upon themselves to keep the Wal-Mart Wikipedia page free from those leftist wackos who try to smear Wal-Mart’s plutonium image of dedicated public service. (What are they thinking?) Anyway, it’s a really interesting dilemma here that I think cleary demarcates the point where it’s difficult (if not impossible) for Wikipedia to maintain a neutral point of view. My prediction is that in a few years (or months?) all pages with a strong corporate interest will suffer the “Propagandistic Wal-Mart Wiki Mis-Editing Syndrome,” (or “I buy everything I need from gas stations and garage sales” for short).

Okay, I made up the part about illegal aliens. But, here’s a report that claims “Wal-mart lobbyists have successfully waged a war against a fair viewpoint on Wikipedia’s Wal-mart page.” Apparently, hundreds of anonymous users are taking it upon themselves to keep the Wal-Mart Wikipedia page free from those leftist wackos who try to smear Wal-Mart’s plutonium image of dedicated public service. (What are they thinking?) Anyway, it’s a really interesting dilemma here that I think cleary demarcates the point where it’s difficult (if not impossible) for Wikipedia to maintain a neutral point of view. My prediction is that in a few years (or months?) all pages with a strong corporate interest will suffer the “Propagandistic Wal-Mart Wiki Mis-Editing Syndrome,” (or “I buy everything I need from gas stations and garage sales” for short).

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I know that I’ve discussed the possibility of students taking and working on notes in a collaborative effort before, but after a quick search I realized that I hadn’t yet blogged about the possibilities of students using technology to help one another focus on key points and note taking skills.
The idea has been floating around […]

I had the privilege of participating in a Web 2.0 panel discussion sponsored by the Digital Media Center at the U. of Minnesota recently. My fellow panelists were David Ernst from the College of Education, Shane Nackerud from the U. library, and Clancy Ratliff from the Department of Rhetoric.
Dave introduced the topic, Shane showed and […]

NB: Mike Edwards contributed heavily to these notes. In fact, most of what’s here is his work, so I want him to get credit for it.

The CCCC Blogging SIG had a large and productive meeting Thursday night in
Chicago. We began by discussing some of the initiatives the SIG had proposed
the previous year, including the one-page paper handout guide for teachers new
to blogging (which, we might hope, will continue to be revised collaboratively and kept up to date as necessary), as well as thoughts about assessment of weblog writing,
outcomes of weblog use in writing courses and professional endeavors, and a possible large multi-institution study investigating the
classroom uses of weblogs.

Following the initial discussion, we split up into five small groups focusing on
action in specific areas. The groups discussed their areas and reported back when
we reconvened. Here are the results of our discussion:

I’ll be sitting on the panel for a seminar at the U. of Minnesota in a few weeks discussing Web 2.0. I met recently with my co-panelists and we decided to put our money where our mouths are and use a wiki to organize our presentation and invite input in advance on the topics we […]

All semester, my students and I have toiled to get the Free Rhetoric and Composition Wikitext ready for use in composition classes. There’s still work to be done, as even a cursory glance will reveal. However, I think we’ve made enough progress to start getting serious about finding reviewers (and, as always, collaborators). If you have a few minutes, why not venture over and give us your impressions? You can use the “Discussion” tabs on each page to offer insight, ask questions, or just make comments.