Wiki, Let's Go.

As a classroom teacher that has watched students rapidly move towards hitting Google and then Wikipedia for all of their needs, wikis occupy an interesting place in recent student technology usage; almost all of my students have used wikis, but few (if any) have had the opportunity to utilize a wiki in a collaborative sense. Like my students, I haven’t had the chance to participate in wiki-ing (would that be the correct verb?). What have we been missing out on? I searched for benefits of wikis and came up with some interesting information. In his blog entitled The Real-world Problem With Wikis (http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=781), Kevin Lim offers the following brief pros and cons of wikis:

Problems:Quality issues (i.e. accuracy and reliability of information)
- Real-world conflicts on what or which version should get published
Benefits:
Speed: Live, real-time publishing
Relatively cheap to maintain
Relatively easy to use
Collaborative, democratic knowledge sharing
Grassroots empowerment

In a very basic way, Lim has summed up what I believe should be clear to many educators; there is really only one reason to “stand against” wikis (Lim’s problems, to me, are related and can be considered to be the same), the issue of reliability and accuracy. From an educational point of view, this may be a moot point (more on this idea to follow) or even a learning opportunity. In Andy Carvin’s article called Turning Wikipedia into an Asset for Schools (http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/2005/07/turning_wikiped.html), he suggests that students should collaborate to choose a topic, check facts, correct mistakes, and cite sources on Wikipedia entries:

“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.”

In other words, if you’re not using Wikipedia as a primary source but as a learning tool, Wikipedia could be amazingly educational and empowering. In Blogs, Wikis. Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Richardson informs readers that if “we begin to look at Wikipedia as another opportunity for our students to contribute what they learn and know to a larger audience, I think we can begin to appreciate it for the really incredible site that it is.” Both Richardson and Carvin make a powerful point that goes to the core of working toward making Web 2.0 tools work for us; if a potential weak element of Wikipedia, its openness, can be flipped to become a positive, what could be better?

But it may be that many of us are missing the point of wikis because we are fixated on Wikipedia, which is the only wiki we are familiar with. Even if Wikipedia is associated with problems of accuracy and reliability, it should not preclude us from using student- or class-created wikis to create learner-driven information.

The idea that wikis are not necessarily about creating simply finished products, but can continue to grow (be edited, added onto, and so on) should allow us to see a web tool as a living entity as opposed to one that is completed and then forgotten. I plan to create a wiki for two of my English classes. The wiki will require students to add pages based on issues arising from the novel April Raintree and the film Where the Spirit Lives. Students will not only work on their own pages but also ultimately read, add, edit, and evaluate others’ pages. So far, I’m thinking about creating one for each class, then having students edit each other’s work. Alternately, I may use the wikis with new students the next time I teach the course. If everything works as planned, we will be able to move towards the ideals Richardson has proposed:

“In using wikis, students are not only learning to publish content; they are also learning how to develop and use all sorts of collaborative skills, negotiating with others to agree on correctness, meaning, relevance, and more. In essence, students begin to teach each other.” (65)

Unfortunately, I cannot fit in the required time to start our wikis before this blog post is due. I did create the wiki and folders for my two classes using pbwiki.com. Not only was it ultra-simple and quick, I also received the following email:

Hi there,
It's Kristine from the PBwiki team, and today I'm going to share some of the best tips for preparing your wiki for your students.
Log into your wiki to follow along. Go to My.PBwiki.comand chose aprilraintree.
Give Students Clear InstructionsTo make sure your students understand how to engage with this new online resources make sure you post clear directions om the front page.
Add student assignments and instructions on the front page.
Treat your wiki front page as a short introduction with links to other pages.
Type a few bullet points and create links to the pages (to link, edit a page, select the text, and click "Insert Link").
If you have handouts, create a page called "Handouts" and upload the files there. Next, use a creative activity to engage your students on your wiki. Here are three examples:
Individual pages- Ask each student to create a wiki page, posting information about their interests and what they hope to learn from the class. Be sure to comment on the pages, and engage them by referencing their personal interests in discussions. Use this as an easy icebreaker to have students get to know each other.
Online spelling list – Create a page titled ‘Spelling’ and post your spelling list. Ask students to post the definition or upload a corresponding image.
Class notes - Each week assign one student to write up the class notes, including important points and class discussion. Be sure to comment on the notes, and add additional insight from the lesson.
For more ideas see how other educators have used wikis in their classroom. Check out our public directory of Educational wikis.
Thanks!
KristineThe PBwiki Team

It’s clear that pbwiki.com is actively working to recruit and retain educational wikis if messages such as these are being sent to people like me. Since I hadn’t done much on the wiki, I took the advice I was given and started a page (and a folder) for handouts; again, it was quick and simple. Although I am not getting my students involved in the project yet, I like the fact that pbwiki has a dedicated section that is committed to helping wiki rookie teachers such as myself.

I also signed up for a wikispaces account to see what that service had to offer; after all, librarywiki said that pbwiki, wikispaces, and wetpaint were the most popular open source wikis. Wikispaces also seems to have made an effort to make educational wikis easy and accessible for teachers and students. I also took a look at wetpaint, but it seemed a little too slick; I was surprised that Lee Lefever does an ad for wetpaint on the home page , and when I clicked on “popular wetpaint sites”, what I saw seemed to be advertisements for television shows or upcoming movies.

I thought I had read that you need to have e-mail addresses to add users to edit pbwikis, but you can create usernames and passwords easily. Changing the look of a site was easy on pbwiki, but wikispaces kept giving me the message “Space settings updated – There was a problem uploading the file”. Wikispaces seems like it is set up to make your site visually attractive, with its easy-looking directions on how to change your wikis logo, content, theme, and so on, whereas on pbwiki you have to upgrade to premium to change your logo, for example. So far, they both seem relatively easy to start up, but if my students and I can’t make the site actually look appealing, it might be a little bit harder to initially get them engaged. Clearly I’ve still got work to do before I can bring it to my students, but that’s okay because we’re not there yet anyway. Wish my students and I happy wiki-ing.

In search of virtual school libraries

Virtual School Libraries – to some readers of this blog, VSL is probably a familiar term. Since I am not a librarian yet, Virtual School Libraries are something I have actually never considered. Yet a search for virtual + library gave me more than twelve million results!

The first place I found showed me how much catching up I had to do for this week’s blog. Margaret Butterworth wrote “The Concept of the Virtual School Library” in 1992, so I’m only around 15 years behind her, right? http://eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/13/e6/83.pdf
Yet I find that so much seems to have changed since Butterworth presented her paper at Annual Conference of the International Association of School Librarianship. Highspeed internet access is taken for granted by many, and the ability to download data, especially video and audio, is so much greater than it was 16 years ago, so to me it seems that many of the ideas Butterworth presented have now become now reality.

I next decided to try to get a definition for Virtual School Libraries or at least virtual libraries. Wikipedia tells me that virtual library is an older term for what is now known as digital library, but the entry also states that a digital library is a “type of information retrieval system” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_library). Since I’m still figuring out what a virtual school library is or could be, I’m not sure that the term “information retrieval system” encompasses the whole concept. At any rate, according to Wikipedia a digital library is listed as having the following assets (as opposed to traditional physical libraries):

· No physical boundary. The user of a digital library need not to go to the library physically; people from all over the world can gain access to the same information, as long as an Internet connection is available.
· Round the clock availability. A major advantage of digital libraries is that people can gain access to the information at any time, night or day.
· Multiple access. The same resources can be used simultaneously by a number of institutions and patrons
· Information retrieval. The user is able to use any search term (word, phrase, title, name, subject) to search the entire collection. Digital libraries can provide very user-friendly interfaces, giving clickable access to its resources.
· Preservation and conservation.Digitization is not a long-term preservation solution for physical collections, but does succeed in providing access copies for materials that would otherwise fall to degradation from repeated use. Digitized collections and born-digital objects pose many preservation and conservation concerns that analog materials do not. Please see the following "Problems" section of this page for examples.
· Space. Whereas traditional libraries are limited by storage space, digital libraries have the potential to store much more information, simply because digital information requires very little physical space to contain them and media storage technologies are more affordable than ever before.
· Added value. Certain characteristics of objects, primarily the quality of images, may be improved. Digitization can enhance legibility and remove visible flaws such as stains and discoloration.

Okay, so now I’ve learned that a digital library is expected to do more than information retrieval. I next tried to find a good example of a digital or virtual library. A plethora of elementary and middle school libraries popped up, but I was still looking at the big picture, so I continued my search. Moving on, I found a reference to the European Library, which again is referred to as a digital library and not necessarily a virtual library. However, the information I discovered amazed me nonetheless. “The European Library is an Internet service that offers access to the resources of 47 European national libraries. The resources, both digital and non-digital, include books, magazines, journals, audio recordings and other material,” according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_European_Library). A person can access resources from 47 libraries from one site? Holy cats! Furthermore, the plan for the future is to provide access to not only libraries but “all major digital heritage holders” (including museums and other archives) in Europe! The provisional launch date for the European Digital Library, which will be known as Europeana, is November 2008. It sounds to me like the future has arrived.

So from Europeana you will be able to, for example, listen to Albert Einstein explain his theory of relativity, look at original manuscripts written by Cervantes, or peruse the Preview to a Grand Piano by Chopin. From a historical point of view, this is great news for a digital rookie like me; anyone can look at artifacts, writing, or pieces of art that previously we may never be able to physically come near. Also, the European Library/European Digital Library is hiring! Who wants to join?

Subsequently, I looked deeper into virtual libraries, starting with the WWW Virtual Library (http://vlib.org/admin/AboutVL). Here I was told:
“The WWW Virtual Library (VL) is the oldest catalogue of the Web, started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of HTML and of the Web itself, in 1991 at CERN in Geneva. Unlike commercial catalogues, it is run by a loose confederation of volunteers, who compile pages of key links for particular areas in which they are expert; even though it isn't the biggest index of the Web, the VL pages are widely recognised as being amongst the highest-quality guides to particular sections of the Web.”

A quick scan of what the WWW Virtual Library had to offer led me to move on; for example, the section on Education had been “decomissioned” and no longer existed.
At this point I felt it was time to put my understanding of the bigger picture (what a virtual school library is and why it is important) on the backburner and go directly to some examples, because the big picture was still seeming too fuzzy. I went to http://www.virtualschoollibrary.org/, where I was given the following informational blurb:

"The Virtual School Library will strive to serve the literary and research/information literacy needs of its visitors, particularly those without access to a professionally staffed school library. Information literacy is defined by the National Forum on Information Literacy as the ability to know when there is a need for information, to be able to identify, locate, evaluate, and effectively use that information for the issue or problem at hand."


The Virtual School Library looks like a site mostly dedicated to helping elementary-age students find books or do research. It contains many links and can send a viewer to many library-related sites, but of course it doesn’t have a comprehensive database such as the European Library site. But is it a virtual school library as envisioned by Butterworth?It’s not necessarily a one-stop spot for reading, researching, and collaborating.
At this point, I’m still vague on what a virtual school library should do and what a virtual school librarian should do. Discovering an article entitled “The Virtual Library: An Idea Whose Time has Passed” made me feel even more behind. But then the author of that piece of writing, James J. O'Donnell, gave me this morsel: “The ‘virtual library’ is a dream that many share, something many have imagined but none has seen.” (http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/virtual.html) Okay, at last I can feel a little less ignorant. O’Donnell goes on to trace the idea of a virtual library back to the second century BC, which of course led me to believe I am even farther behind in this route of discovery that I hoped, but I soldiered on. O’Donnell goes on to tell readers:

“In an information waterfall, the virtual library that tells us everything and sweeps us off our feet with a storm of data will not be highly prized. The librarian will have to be a more active participant in staving off infochaos. If the traditional librarian has been conceived as a figure at home in the discreet silences and cautious dealings of a Henry James novel, now perhaps the right models will be found in James Fennimore Cooper or the Star Wars films: something between Natty Bumppo the 'Pathfinder' and the Jedi knight will be the best mascot for a library school.”

Wow, there’s an interesting image for us. More importantly, the image of a librarian sternly shushing students may fade away as we forge the way like Jedi knights through Web 2.0. But the question remains for me, is this idea still in the future or is it here and now?

One virtual school library I was impressed with was the Springfield Township Virtual Library (http://www.sdst.org/shs/library/). The databases by subject area alone looks like a wealth of student/teacher information, and the online reference catalogs area also appear well done. At the same time, both of these sections of the virtual library could also be daunting for a newcomer – here’s where the Jedi knight librarian wades in and saves the day. A simpler version of a virtual school library is the Virtual Middle School Library, which of course makes sense since it is formatted for use by middle school students instead of high school students. How do they compare otherwise? They both send viewers to sites for resources (students, teachers, parents), both have subject directories, both can help you find magazine and journal articles, and they’re both available all day, every day (I wish my local public library was open all the time). Is this the kind of virtual library I’m looking for? More importantly, are these the kinds of virtual libraries students are looking for?

An article I found about student opinions on library use (Pew Study: Students Prefer 'Virtual Library') revealed that many students are using the Internet as their library already. That idea doesn’t seem new to me, but the powerful idea that librarians can help students learn more efficiently and more enjoyably through a virtual school library is what is slowly dawning on me. The possibilities seem almost endless, but a few of the things librarians who create their virtual libraries could do are:
· ensure that students aren’t directly sent to sites that are filtered in the school, frustrating everyone.
· help students and teachers use some of the catalogs, databases and reference sources that may seem unwieldy to utilize.
· assist in setting up collaborative learning options using Web 2.0 applications.
· connect virtual library clients to amazing new sites like the European Library.
· Develop virtual libraries that are user-driven, so that students, teachers and parents find them user-friendly and gravitate toward them instead of always heading for Google and Wikipedia.

I think I’ve finally learned what a virtual school library is, or at least what I think it should be – just see the list above.

First REAL podcast

Podcasts and the art of sound

“Podcasting is one of the most exciting and wonderfully disruptive technologies to emerge in recent history.”

The quote above, from the Podcasting in Education site (http://chatt.hdsb.ca/~magps/boylit/Podcasting%20in%20Education), is a thought-provoking one for me (it is not directly attributed, but it seems to be from the webmaster Shaun Else). “Wonderfully disruptive”, that’s an interesting phrase; what does it mean? The term makes me think that podcasting is disrupting old ways of education, old ways of listening, old ways of being entertained, and/or old ways of learning. What does it mean to Else? Well, he has specific reasons for using podcasting in the classroom, such as increasing literacy:

“As the Ministry of Education document "Me Read? No Way!" suggest some of this gap may be an expression of lack of interest, and/or lack of appropriate strategies used by teachers. I have proposed the use of podcasting in the classroom to elevate interest in literacy among boys, if not all students. Based on approval from my administration, I submitted an application/proposal for a grant from the "Halton Learning Foundation" to fund the hardware needed to begin using the podcasting in Maple Groves for the 2006/7 year. We started Radio Maple Grove as a small club and through use in class, and I have been promoting it's use as a class tool/strategy with staff. Radio Maple Grove is a place where audio about books, speeches, and other school happenings are showcased.”
(http://chatt.hdsb.ca/~magps/boylit/Podcasting%20in%20Education)
To me, that quote leads me to believe that podcasting is less disruptive than forward-thinking. Using podcasts as a new way to get students more involved in reading, writing, and communicating makes sense in today’s world. Not only can students, teachers and other collaborators benefit from online broadcasting; parents can as well. Parents can listen to what their children are doing while jogging, riding a bus, as they’re driving…the possibilities are far-flung. For busy parents such as myself who don’t always get the opportunity to celebrate their kids’ successes, having the flexibility to listen when time permits, podcasting could be a huge boon.
There are some other implications for educational uses of podcasting. One big plus for podcasting as opposed to using videosharing sites such as YouTube is that the impetus for blocking sites is lessened; I suppose the possibility of hearing questionable content is less than viewing and listening to questionable content. Consequently, the chances of more students and teachers being able to use podcasting to a greater degree are much higher than YouTube. Also, without the pressure of creating visually stunning or highly entertaining images, students can focus more deeply on speaking more effectively and hooking people’s attention with sound (incidentally, Daniel J. Schmit has called the last two points unique features of using podcasting effectively in the classroom – see http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/technology/techspecial2/25podcast.html?_r=2&oref=slogin ). For English teachers like myself, gaining a whole new world of prospects for speaking and listening is like finding a pot of gold.

Perhaps at this point I should admit that my knowledge and appreciation of podcasting prior to recent personal research of amateur internet-distributed radio was sorely lacking. I do own an iPod and I have downloaded a few podcasts over the last couple of years, but I had no idea that it had become such a phenomenon. The Education Podcast Network lists 154 podcasts relating to English Language Arts alone (see: http://epnweb.org/index.php?request_id=39&openpod=4#anchor4)! Well. What else have I been missing?
So after scolding myself for being so backwards, I dove into creating my first podcast. After downloading Audacity, I had a goofy time with my new headset microphone - I still haven't figured it all out yet. At any rate, I managed to record a few seconds of an introduction. Unfortunately, podOmatic was undergoing site maintenance when I began to upload. Aargh! Finally I was allowed to finish uploading. My first test worked, but even after a few tries, I couldn’t get a Flickr RSS feed to hook up with my podcast when viewed/listened on my blog. The images worked fine when viewed on podOmatic, but went to black when watching and listening from the blog.
I’ve been trying to upload a “Real” podcast but podOmatic keeps giving me an “Internal Server Error” message. I really wanted to delete my earlier tiny test podcasts and insert a real one, but technology is refusing to be my friend right now. I’ll try again later, sometimes friends just need some time alone.

Social Bookmarking and flying through tag clouds

Okay, it was time to delve further into the powerful possibilities of sharing and learning via social bookmarking.

So I registered for Delicious and instantly made a big mistake, which was importing all favourites from my computer into bookmarks. Then I spent an inordinate amount of time deleting all of those of my various family members, those I didn’t think I would be returning to very often at all, and those I didn’t want others to see. I’ve just started to wrap my head around the idea that unless I specify otherwise, anyone can see what I’ve been looking at: I don’t think you need to know which fantasy hockey sites I’ve perused or which obscure music portals I’ve accessed, do you?
One of the next things I tried was checking out a tag cloud for popular tags, choosing social networking to see what could give me more information about bookmarking (which I added as another tag to narrow the search). Unfortunately, the first ones that popped up looked more like advertisements or promotional materials than useful sites.

But one site, D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html), has published an article called Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review (I found it through Delicious). This site offered some interesting insights which now seem obvious to me, such as the similarities between Delicious and Flickr: both are popular in part because of their sharing capabilities. It’s simple, easy and quick to connect with people, links and images. FFFFOUND! is another site that specializes in socially bookmarking images (http://ffffound.com/).

At any rate, the important point is that we don’t have to just look at any site Google sends us to, now we can choose from recommendations from others without even having to ask for them. In fact, we don’t need to always forward links to others if they are already a contact on Delicious, because they can check out our bookmarks whenever they like. The D-Lib Article also included an interesting point about how views about learning, reading and writing are changing. In the old days, we couldn’t necessarily share our sources – we didn’t all have the same books or journals; all we could do was cite our references.

“Why spill any ink (digital or not) in rewriting what someone else has already written about instead of just pointing at the original story and adding the merest of titles, descriptions and tags for future reference?” (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html)

Of course, one of the drawbacks of social networking as I have seen so far is the problem of social networkers using different tags for the same links. If those we are sharing with don’t use same tags, the system falls apart and we revert to searching, skimming and scanning. The writers of the D-Lib magazine article think that there are ways to improve upon this problem, but it hasn’t happened yet:

"Anecdotal evidence (see Jon Udell's screencast on del.icio.us [23]) supports the view that there is a natural tendency towards the convergence of tags. Strategies to facilitate this development are also possible. In a blog entry entitled 'Folksonomies: How we can improve the tags' [24], Lars Pind has suggested various possibilities including the following: a) 'suggest tags for me', b) 'find synonyms automatically', c) 'help me use the same tags others use', d) 'infer hierarchy from the tags', and e) 'make it easy to adjust tags on old content'. Currently only option e) appears to be in common use, presumably because it is the easiest to implement. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html)

I think the possibilities put forth by Pind above would be very helpful for myself as well as for students. At http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking I learned that some "bookmarking sites allow members to rank the site’s usefulness as well.” On Delicious you can see how many other people have bookmarked sites but I haven't found rankings I'd like to see yet.

Another bookmarking site I’ve started to check out is Digg.



As I understand it, Digg essentially lets a user submit sites they think are good. According to the site, “Digg is democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.” (http://digg.com/how) I can see how you could build a network through which fruitful collaboration could be gained, so far I don’t see it as being as useful as Delicious. One of the simple tests I’ve started using to check out a new site such as this one is to search for a really obscure musical artist who happens to be one of my favourites (his name is Robyn Hitchcock). Delicious came up with 180 results, Digg none. Clearly this is not a scientific test or a breaking point in whether or not I use the site, but Delicious seems more useful at this point anyway.

Stumbleupon is another site I had heard of but never tried (http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/stumbleuopn/). Like Digg, this site works on users rating other sites, but it also seems to be more of a bookmarking site as well. Essentially, you can filter by tags, look at another user’s rating of a site, rate it yourself, and see some other recommendations based on Stumbleupon’s search engine all on the same page. It also passed my Robyn Hitchcock test, but so far the site still seems like one built for specified surfing more than a true social bookmarking, sharing, collaborative site like Delicious. Both Digg and Stumbleupon are colourful, graphically pleasing sites that might be realy appealing to those younger than I or anyone who needs visual stimulation. Delicious is aesthetically simple, which I don't mind, but I think Digg and Stumbleupon are going to be popular with students beacuse of their visual appeal and their thumbs up/thumbs down rating schemes.

The obvious uses of bookmarking sites like Delicious are ones I should be able to use right away with my students. I don’t have to give them a bunch of urls or links if I can just show them bookmarks. But the real collaboration will be when they bookmark sites they’ve found and share them. I will easily be able to see which ones they deem worthy of sharing, so I’ll be able to find out some good information about their ability to evaluate websites (and I can do this on an individual and class basis). As long as we’re using the same tags, we’ll be sailing, and many of us will be able to access our bookmarks from home. This aspect of teacher/class collaboration is what excites me the most, because student ownership, authority and confidence are definitely areas I need to foster in my classes.

Furthermore, I can see some eye-opening experiences could be gained by working with classes from other schools. Once students start to see that they’re adding to a knowledge base outside of their own school, the exhilaration I’m feeling with the possibilities of social bookmarking, sharing and collaborating now will hopefully be passed on to them.