Festival Report/Ch9WikiLounge

Wiki Lounge Wiki hacking at Drumbeat There are a bunch of collaborative wiki projects and some with different names that have the wiki nature. • Wikiotics • Wikipedia in Education o The Public Policy Initiative o Wikimedia campus ambassadors • Wikieducator and Wikiversity • Multilingual wikihacks • Open Video hacks for video editing o Video on Wikipedia project • add more Wikipedia, Wikieducator, Wikiversity, and other wikis are often used in education -- by students, teachers, parents, and authors. Below are some specific ideas we will pursue at Drumbeat.

Wikipedia in Education How to use Wikipedia in the Classroom, how fields can use Wikipedia to enhance their shared research. Examples from classics (Murder, Madness, and Mayhem), art, and science. Public Policy Initiative Examples from a specific current project -- building a consortium of universities and professors. Campus Ambassadors Building a consortium of student support.

Wikiversity and Wikieducator Collaborating on class and other learning materials, in and out of the classroom. Both of these projects encourage educators and learners to publih their learning materials and work directly on a wiki, and to hack on every layer of the educational materials stack. Retrieved from "https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/Wikis_in_Education#Wikipedia_in_Education"

Wikipedia for Teachers

Spinned off from the Bookshelf Project, that depends from the Outreach Program http://outreach.wikimedia.org of the MediaWiki Foundation, Wikipedia for Teachers pretends to foster a material designed to allow easy assimilation of new Wikipedians of schools and universities into the community. The materials aim to increase new contributor awareness and interest, foster excitement towards Wikipedia, and provide key training tools. The materials are being developed in English. However they are to be designed for easy translation, localization, and customization by volunteers, chapters, and educational institutions such as schools and universities.

Wikipedia for Teachers http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_for_Teachers_-_School_%28Bookshelf%29 provides with the tools teachers need to ensure students understand for which purposes Wikipedia can be used and for which it cannot. The Bookshelf materials also provide lesson plans teachers can adapt for students know how to research, write, edit and work collaboratively. Asking your students to improve Wikipedia articles will add some extra value to courses. By assigning Wikipedia articles as coursework to students, they will gain: • insight into the creation process of texts on Wikipedia • experience in discerning between appropriate and inappropriate uses of Wikipedia • a strengthened ability to think critically and evaluate information sources • knowledge of the difference between fact-based and analytical writing styles • accountability to a global audience for knowledge they are sharing • experience of working in a collaborative environment.

Multilingualism & Wikiotics language studio https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/events/Festival/program/wikiotics

Attendees: Werner Westermann Lynart G. Denis Barthel Matt Curinga Rod - Wikipedia Eamon Costello - DCU, Ireland Heather James (note taking) A few others, I missed their names!

This is a tiny keyboard. I apologize in advance for the low-accuracy. I have had to make a sacrifice for speed. - The Notetaker.

Title: Wikiotics

Summary

Started 2 yrs ago, Ian and colleague at software freedom law centre. They noticed not much good software for language learning. Lessons organized into pages. Keep a revision history. Each concept has a prompt, image and audio.

These are organized into pages. You get four concepts, a prompt and four image. It takes a communicative approach to language learning. If learning spanish its in spanish.

15 languages. These are in early stage prototypes. Free software for language learning.

Tracks revisions, you can fork it. It`s custom development built on Django. The project is on github.

alpha.wikiotics.org

Matt finished his PhD this summer. Matt has a long background in software dev. .. now educational technology. Soon he hopes to develop on this project. Matt managed the pedagogy. They will do design research.

From the learning point of view. Interesting to have language learners develop their own media. Or for instructors to use local this is a door in our school.

Also peer teaching across heterogenous language groups. And creating language learning.

We`ve lined up a community tech center - for Spanish speakers learning english. Paired with private Chinese language.

Pair classgroups. Across countries. Match people age gender. They`re writing up the proposals.

Persian lesson- record this in your native language. For example. Talking into a hearing is all built in.

You can do an image search for CC licensed images from Flickr.

I can have my own lessons in my space for control. Students can`t change info there.

Most people in language instruction fall back to the native language. These are abstract concepts.

How to sell this to a language teacher? asks Heather

This is not only where you collect the materials, but you can represent yourself. They can look at the history of your lessons. You made it into an interesting sequence of lessons. They will want get more content from you. It`s easier to make these kinds of lessons, than it is to

This is a time saver.

As soon as the person build… you can copy the whole

You can change - to copy all the images and replace either the text. Intense forking. You need confidence that you have control over it.

We want to meet the informal learning goals. This is a great sequences of learning Spanish. Also applies to a more formal setting.

You can get the students to produce the media as well.

For teachers it´s a reputational gain. This is where your materials come from. This can build a profile online.

Eamon Costello of DCU asks- how can you ensure people are contributing?

Ian Working with individuals. You can get the materials they want you to go through.

Regarding the interface. These are flashcards. There are different ways of getting at that. When we add audio. It`s just a card with a few sentences!

Credit is kept. All attributions and brought through the system.

Now we work through a demo. Ian starts a brainstorm about a Barcelona themed lesson.

Over the next day, we`ll pull these on the live site. We`ll make a Catalan lesson.

Part 2 tomorrow!

http://backpass.org/2010/11/05/murder-mayhem-and-mystery-wikipedia-in-the-classroom/ Murder, Mayhem and Mystery – Wikipedia in the Classroom November 5th, 2010 § Leave a Comment Back in the summer I listened to Brian Lamb from UBC reference an amazing project at his university where students worked on Wikipedia articles and achieved the extremely rare goal of getting ‘featured’ on the homepage (less than 1% of articles manage this.) Today at Drumbeat I was lucky enough to hear about the project direct from the man who initiated it. John Beasley Murray had been exploring and contributing to Wikipedia as a work avoidance ploy and in doing this he realized that the articles in his area of expertise weren’t great and that maybe his students could do better. So for an entire semester he set his class the goal of either editing or creating articles based on the authors and the novels they were covering in a Latin America literature class – with guaranteed As for any team that got featured. In the end they managed an amazing three featured articles and a slew of ‘good’s (in itself an impressive achievement) and as an amazing side effect the work they did with Wikipedia not only gave them a much more mature insight into how to use Wikipedia but it also reignited much more traditional research skills with some of them actually really using the library for the first time though at one point the librarian recommended their own wiki age to them! It is also nice to hear of the huge support some of the Wikipedia editors gave the students as often you only hear about vandalism and barriers from editors when the majority are knowledgable and helpful. The Wikipedia project page is well worth scanning through; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Murder_Madness_and_Mayhem They get the kind of traffic most scholarly publications would kill for and the entire project us an inspiring demonstration on the opportunities that can arise when traditional and open methods meet rather than clash! “ This is a remarkable project, and a herculean task realized in the short time span of less than 15 weeks. Jon and his students are [a] model for thinking, sharing and contributing with[in] the open space of the internet. An important act of faith and intellectual responsibility. It is ever so impressive. ” —Jim Groom[1] “ Gives students real-world experience finding their way, collaboratively, to high standards of content and writing in their field. It's an incredible example of what college students and their inspired teacher can do, collaborating, reflecting, listening, revising. ” —Barbara Ganley[2] “ Over the course of the last few months I have learned so much about writing I cannot even express... and it shows. I have been a B+/A- student throughout my entire undergraduate career, and my last two papers have been A's! I think the grades speak for themselves. ” —Monica Freudenreich[3] “ I will no longer allow my daughter to consider attending the University of British Columbia, so long as Murray is paid to teach there. ” —Gregory Kohs[4] The University of British Columbia's class SPAN312 ("Murder, Madness, and Mayhem: Latin American Literature in Translation") contributed to Wikipedia during Spring 2008. Our collective goals were to bring a selection of articles on Latin American literature to featured article status (or as near as possible). By project's end, we had contributed three featured articles and eight good articles. None of these articles was a good article at the outset; two did not even exist. We had the unstinting support of the (in)famous FA-Team, who took this on as their first mission. We were also fortunate to have the support of members of Wikiproject Novels. The collaboration of other interested Wikipedia editors was of course very much appreciated. We would like to thank everyone for their hard work and incredible generosity. Feel free to discuss this project. With the FA-Team, we are also now embarking on an analysis and post-mortem. You may also want to look at the following essay: • "Was Introducing Wikipedia to the Classroom an Act of Madness Leading Only to Mayhem if not Murder?". An essay by jbmurray. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness

Wikipedia: unloved but ubiquitous in academia At present, Wikipedia hovers at the fringes of academia, like an uninvited guest. Wikipedia's aims are eminently academic, concerned with collecting, processing, storing, and transmitting knowledge. Judging by the number of the site's articles and readers, it has been remarkably successful at promoting a culture of intellectual inquiry. Yet it is fairly consistently derided by academics themselves. Still, everybody uses it, in one way or another, even if they might want not to admit to the fact. Above all, our students use it, openly or otherwise (as they are often explicitly told not to cite Wikipedia articles in term papers), but without necessarily knowing how it works. They are told that Wikipedia is bad, but they are not often told why; and of course, they find it an incredibly useful resource. I decided to include Wikipedia as a central part of a course I was teaching in the belief that it was only by actively contributing to the encyclopedia that students would learn about its weaknesses, as well as its strengths. And also with the idea that they would thereby, and perhaps rather incidentally, improve articles in a field (Latin American literature) in which in my experience Wikipedia has been especially weak. Wikipedia was to occupy a central part of the course, but it was not to be the centre itself. This was not a course about Wikipedia but rather, as with my other courses, its focus would continue to be on Latin America and on the reading of a set number of Latin American literary texts. In this case, a course entitled "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem," these texts were a series of dictator novels, by authors ranging from the nineteenth-century Argentine Domingo Sarmiento to the contemporary stars of Latin American letters, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. These books are neither short nor simple; most of the students' time would be spent reading these hefty tomes, and most of the class time spent explaining and discussing them. So there was little direct discussion of Wikipedia in the classroom. Rather, the assignment was that, in groups, the students should edit (and in a couple of cases create) Wikipedia articles on the texts and authors that we were covering, and that over the course of the semester they should bring these articles up to what in Wikipedia parlance is called "featured article" status. When setting that assignment, I had not really comprehended how ambitious it was. Wikipedia defines a "featured article" as an article that "exemplifies [its] very best work and features professional standards of writing and presentation." And its standards are, in fact, impressively high. Indeed, it is a central paradox of Wikipedia that its standards are impeccable, even as its actual performance so often lags far behind these standards. To give some indication: fewer than 0.1% of Wikipedia's articles are featured articles. Indeed, as far as I can tell, while Wikipedia has been the subject of numerous educational assignments, from universities as far apart as Sydney, Hong Kong, Minnesota, and Leiden, this would be the first time in which students were explicitly asked to create featured articles. In the end, an essay or an exam is an instance of busywork: usually written in haste; for one particular reader, the professor; and thereafter discarded. It is a lamentable fact that, with rare exceptions such as in the Composition classroom, students are seldom motivated to re-read and reflect upon their own work. Indeed, they often scarcely even glance at the comments professors laboriously write up on their work: understandably given that there is usually by this stage no chance to change things further, they are interested in the grade, and that is it. Students seldom learn about the importance of revision to good writing. And yet on Wikipedia, revision is (almost) everything: contributors are called editors precisely because their writing is a near-constant state of revision. Moreover, here they would be contributing to pages that in some instances (the article on Gabriel García Márquez, for instance) received over 60,000 page views per month. Even the least visited articles they were writing receive several hundred monthly visits. Here they would be writing for a public audience, also one that almost uniquely was in a position to write back, to re-write and comment upon what they were writing. Indeed, working on Wikipedia had the potential to become a collaborative process: students would have to collaborate not only with each other, but also with fellow editors or wikipedians who they met only on the wiki itself. Finally, I liked the notion that the grade that they would receive for this assignment would come from outside the class itself; that their work would be judged by its external impact, and not by the professor's personal judgement (however professional that might be). I declared from the outset that a group that turned its article into a "featured article" would receive an A+, no questions asked; and that groups that achieved "good article" status (a lower hurdle, though good articles still account for only about 0.15% of Wikipedia's total) would receive an A. The assignment grade, in other words, would be determined by collective, public, peer review.