Its going to get hot

Larry Sanger is forking Wikipedia.

(digg)

On a mission to world wikination

Wikisapces has a mission: Today, we’re proud to raise the bar on a program we started back in January: we’re setting the goal of giving away 100,000 wikis to K-12 educators.

Vini, vidi wiki

Wired runs a review on the state of wikis, education included.

Wikipedia adds new feature – Cite This Article

Interesting Wikipedia feature: Cite This Article. From anywhere inside wikipedia click on ‘Cite This Article’ to get the full citation in 9 different formats, MLA, APA, and Bibtex included!

No less interesting is the discussion on Digg about the viability of citing Wikipedia.

read more | digg story

Personal Learning Environments at Fortnightly Mailing

I wrote a short piece on PLEs that was inspired by the CETIS Personal Learning Environments Meeting held in Manchester this week.

Both Phillip and I attended. And guess what? We could actually sit outside without getting wet.

The piece appears in Seb Schmoller's Fortnightly Mailing, which is a great resource for anyone interested in e-learning and related topics.

In the mean time I've been building up a collection of PLE-related resources over on the wiki.

The Economist says…

The Economist recently ran a survey on emerging media. Among other things, claiming that blogs and wikis are changing journalism from a sermon to a discussion.

A recent article on China and the Internet (subscribers only) claims that the government, with its 30,000 power internet police, can't keep up with blogger's challenges. 

notes from session 3

Our discussion of paper on friendster

This discussion focused on a range of points, including:
the relationship between research and personal experience
design and the 're-design' of systems through their usage
the way in which idealised sociological views (in this case of how relationships might happen) get materially embedded in the design of applications
how the use of this application reveals the complexity of identity
ideas of the public and private and how these get taken up and understood differently by people
the need to reflect on our own processes and experiences when researching software – including what motivates us
the ways in which system are not designed to reflect reality
the question of whether or not systems such as this offer new ways of performing identities
the pleasures of fraudalent identities
the remaking of authority and power relations – a sense that everyone is equal but that they are not – the ever present power relations of off-line realities
motivations and negotiations of identity – different levels of negotiation
the nature and character of friendship on and off line

Our use of supporting technologies in the group to date

Carey gave her 'reflection' on the groups use of the wiki, blog, mailing list etc. Her main points were:

There are some differences in many of the posts that go on wiki and blog – as outlined in the table on our wiki – such as length, personal vs public, etc.

However the distinction in our use of these resources is not as clear as the table we built up may suggest.

There were many posts that went across the blog and wiki, these seemed to have a particular characteristic which was the interconnectedness of 'content/info' and 'narrative/personnel account' almost as if the impossibility – or difficulty of separating out the the knowledge/info and the personal experience it was embedded in meant that it could not be clear where to put the post. Is this perhaps something to do with the personalisation of knowledge and the shifting boundaries between knowledge, information and personal experience?

We then looked at these in terms of how they configure the semiotic resources of time, pace and rhythm, spatial design, public private differently.

At the next meeting we will attempt to think what the effective use of these semiotic resources might be like for learning.

Digital Maoism – Problems with the hive mind

I found this an interesting essay on the problems of 'collective intelligence':

In the real world it is easy to not direct films. I have attempted to retire from directing films in the alternative universe that is the Wikipedia a number of times, but somebody always overrules me. Every time my Wikipedia entry is corrected, within a day I'm turned into a film director again.
DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism [5.30.06]
By Jaron Lanier
An Edge Original Essay

www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge183.html

One Wiki per child?

Walter Bender (OLPC) and David Cavallo (MIT Media Lab) recently visited the LKL to update us on the progress of the OLPC (one laptop per child, aka $100 laptop) project. One of the recent developments they mentioned is the inclussion of a Wiki on each machine. This would primarily be used as an ebook reader, but they see it going much further.

This relates in interesting ways to Mark's ideas on PLEs, as well as to the continium of private — public spcaces.

Wiki Building

I just built my first Wiki by myself… feels good. It was a good exercise to do as it has really helped me to better understand the purpose of a Wiki as a site for knowledge collaboration. It wasn’t until I had to grasp the overall structure of the site, and to design instructions for others on how to use it that I really began to understand how the Wiki works. I’m still working on it and still learning, but getting there.

I’m feeling more confident about Wiki use and about the potential use I could make of it in a school setting (Lyndsay’s case study on wiki use in schools helped a lot there – thanks Lyndsay).

I also like the shape the LKL Wiki is taking on… I think we’re making good progress. It’s good to see that most of us have now contributed something, and said a little about ourselves and our interests in the project and the HowTo and WhatIs pages are giving it more of a ‘knowledge-building’ feel, I think.

When I began building the PBWiki for Mirandanet, I was struck by some questions that came to me as I began to generate a skeleton structure:

What does the Wiki need to do?

Who is the Wiki for?

What kind of knowledge will they have?

How will they use it?

Why will they use it?

What kind of structure is required?

What is the best/easiest/most aesthetic design?

Public of private?

Free or Pay

Content – what’s relevant and how to show it

Examples – how to show what users need to know

Getting users on board – how to share

Keeping progress safe – backup facilities

Linking – rss feeds, hyperlinks, search facilities

Tracking – tagging, keywords, recent changes, history

As I built the Wiki and wrestled with these ideas, and thought about the purpose of the Wiki and who would use it and what they would want to get from it – it finally dawned on me what the Wiki is and why it is different, more structured, than (say) something like this blog or a web page… it’s the collaborative nature of the thing… the whole point of the Wiki is that it’s not just shared (like a blog) – it’s (as Lyndsay suggested somewhere, I think)… a quasi-independent entity… it’s a thing-in-itself with a reason for being… it’s purpose of knowledge building… generates a space that is neither individual, nor collective but an amalgam of both… and separated from both… it becomes like a ‘cultural’ collective space, if you like… still fuzzy, that notion, but I’ll keep on thinking.

It’s like (for me) the blog is a discussion space, a meeting place… where we all keep our individual identities (and separated -as opposed to separate because in a way they interlink, through comments and temporal hierarchical positioning – narratives) whereas the Wiki is, not so much a ‘thinking’ space as a place of ‘established’ narratives – of community generated concepts (as in Mika’s piece). There’s a collaborative ‘will’ in the construction of knowledge in that space… towards a shared goal – the codification of an evolving structure into an emergent set of communal values (or ontology). Hmm, interesting, I seem to have come full circle tonight.