First Monday Article

As a follow-up to this Wikiversity course, please have a look at the article I co-authored with Norm Friesen (Canada Research Chair, eLearning) of Thompson Rivers University. Wikiversity; or education meets the free culture movement: An ethnographic investigation was published in the October 2008 issue of First Monday.

Week 10 - More Course Feedback

Goodbye Wikiversity course participants. This is probably my last post for this course. I managed to add comments to a few more blogs this week. I'll be visiting others that are updated in the final week because I don't want to miss any of your remarks, photos, video, etc.
Congratulations to the facilitators and participants for making this experience possible. I have appreciated and learned from everyone's contributions. I just sent out an email to many of you with these six questions (for a paper I'm writing):

1. What is the most important thing you've gained through participation in the Wikiversity course?

2. Were you involved with Wikiversity before taking this course?

3. Did you or will you complete this course? What factors have influenced your completion status in this course?

4. Will you continue to take an interest in Wikiversity after this course?
Explain.

5. Does this course fit in with other courses you are taking?
Or are you doing it out of professional, personal or other interests?

6. Feel free to comment about any other aspects of your experience
in this course:

If you didn't get the email with these questions, please feel free to send your answers to me at at_consultingbc@yahoo.ca

Thanks to everyone!

Week 9 - Evaluation and Feedback

Today, I visited more course participants' blogs and posted comments. I haven't visited everyone's blog yet, but will try to complete that task in week 10.
I continue to learn each week from this Wikiversity course experience. I am building on my own knowledge about OER and open source software, but I have also acquired some useful skills. The facilitators have provided us with really valuable links to online audio and video development and sharing tools that I plan to implement at some point in my own teaching.
I have also learned what it feels like to work alongside a very international learning cohort in a wiki technology environment. Some people might think that a ten week course is too long, and I suppose it was for some people as we have far fewer people now than at the start of the course. However, in some ways, this course really isn't long enough for the participants to bond as a learning community. I think the low level of participant interaction has more to do with busy lives and other work responsibilities than other factors. From my perspective, participation in this course feels less community-connected than I expected it to be at this point. This is not a criticism, just an observation.
What is more surprising to me is that we were given multiple methods for communication: IRC; Google Groups; participant Blog / Blog comment; facilitator Blog / Blog comment; course feedback page; and participant email, etc. Yet, all of these communication tools haven't led to significant participant communication (that I'm aware of) within this group.
I am glad that the course has been extended for two extra weeks to encourage more communication and feedback. I doubt that I would have made the effort to review more blogs if the course had ended on schedule. So, for me, the facilitators have made a good decision. I also think that the facilitators have been very flexible and accommodating to support participants who couldn't follow the weekly schedule.
More blog comments and feedback to come next week. It's been fun.

Week 8 - Sharing Video

The following video is a presentation given by Catherine Casserly:
"Open Educational Resources: Unlocking Knowledge to the Global Community."



Assistive Technology at a Glance

This is a 30 second video that I recorded on a digital camera. It is short because the camera would only record for 30 seconds at a time. It was filmed in my classroom this afternoon. It's not very good quality and my camera movement is not smooth because I didn't plan very well. The video shows some of the assistive technology that we use in our special education classroom.
I registered on dotSUB.com and uploaded the video. Then I added the captions. There is no audio to accompany the video. Because this video is so short and not very good quality, I didn't post it on YouTube or Blip.tv . I really enjoyed working on this assignment and the assignments from weeks 6 and 7. It's great to learn about Web-based services that can help me make better use of the technology that's available.

Week 7 - Sharing Audio

First, I reviewed two types of audio software: Audacity and TextAloudMP3. However, I ended up registering for a free account on Odeo.com
I simply used the audio recording tool on Odeo to record my description of my house. I thought that was much easier than installing more software on my computer. I already have TextAloudMP3 on my computer, but it generates a synthesized computer voice.
I took pictures from the front and back of my house and uploaded these to Flickr. The pictures were taken on April 16th, 2008.
My podcast is loaded on the audio player below. Just click the arrow to hear the description.

Week 6 - Taking and Sharing Pictures

Photography is something that I do on an informal basis, without ever having done any reading or courses on technique. So, I decided to make the most of this opportunity to actually learn something about photographic technique.
I started by reading all of the Digital Photography Composition tips

I think these are valuable concepts to keep in mind. I use a digital camera quite regularly in my special education classroom to document student projects, activities, and social events. We create photo scrapbooks for each of our students and send them home at the end of each year. The families really love these books as they are a customized yearbook for their "low incidence category" teenager who is not able to be integrated into regular classes or other school events.

I also reviewed the Quality Image Guidelines for Wikimedia

It is important for Wikimedia to provide contributors with image standards in order to establish a quality media collection. Ongoing quality management steadily increases the value and reputation of the Wikimedia resources and encourages reuse of the images. I was impressed with images I searched for under several categories, and will keep Wikimedia in mind for educational re-purposing of content. In special education, images are really valuable for communicating with non-verbal students. Wikimedia images could be used in my classroom on communication boards, cards, and games.

I uploaded ten photographs of Sun Peaks Resort onto Flickr. I've used Flickr before, so it wasn't unfamiliar. However, I'd never placed my images on a map before. It took me a while to think about the tags and descriptions I wanted to give each picture. I'll try to put these ten pictures on my blog as a slide show.

Then I visited Wikimedia Commons to upload an image. First I created a page on Wikimedia called Sun Peaks Resort.

Then I did an upload of one image. My file description wasn't right, so I followed the "bad name" instructions. Then I uploaded the same image with a new file destination description. That put my image on this page.

I thought the photograph would be easy to place on the Sun Peaks Resort page that I created first, but I haven't figured out how to get the image on that page. Can anyone comment on this?

I've also had difficulty putting my ten Flickr photos onto a slideshow on this blog. I've done this successfully on a different blog. However, the Blogger slideshow application is adding other peoples' Flickr photos to my sets, so I'll probably post a couple of my pictures separately. It's taken me a couple of hours of fussing with all of this. I think I'm doing better with text than I am with images right now.

Week 5 - Wikipedia and Wikimedia

Three articles are assigned for this week:
*How and Why Wikipedia Works: An Interview with Angela Beesley, Elisabeth Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.
*The Hidden Order of Wikipedia
*Wikimedia Projects

First, I read the interview and was impressed by the years of dedication to Wikipedia development shown by the three interviewees. I was also struck by the complexity of the Wikipedia organization. It is amazing that Wikipedia functions through self-selected participation, yet has a systematic meritocracy for senior position nomination and peer selection. I was very interested in the internationalization and translation efforts that have created such a linguistically diverse encyclopedia project. Although all are different language versions of Wikipedia, each is a unique project on its own.
I was also intrigued by the mediation aspects of Wikipedia that are necessary for conflict resolution. It seems to be such a huge undertaking to continuously police the project for vandalism, spam, and other abuse. It is interesting that there remains a strong commitment to keeping Wikipedia open for anyone to edit. I can imagine that article conflict often arises over politically or historically-charged events. I'm sure it is not an easy task to mediate content development.
Out of curiosity, I decided to look for a Wikipedia article that would be contentious. I selected the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Interestingly, the page has been locked down with this message:
This page is currently protected from editing until disputes have been resolved. Protection is not an endorsement of the current version (protection log). Please discuss changes on the talk page or request unprotection. You may use {{editprotected}} on the talk page to ask for an administrator to make an edit for you.
The history and discussion pages for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks article reveal episodes of vandalism and conflict over content and links. Some of the discussion becomes personal, and it is apparent that some people resent having their links or contributions removed.

The article, The Hidden Order of Wikipedia, discusses the feature article process of Wikipedia. The article discusses commons-based peer-production and self-governance. However, much of the content focuses on the making of a Wikipedia feature article and its supporting processes. The authors examined feature articles and their "talk" pages to gain insight on the development process. They also interviewed the director of Wikipedia's front-page Feature Articles (FA).
The authors found that selection criteria for FA had become stricter over the years.
Currently, nominated articles enter the feature article candidate process, which takes about five days. If the FA director rules that there is concensus in support of the article, then it is designated as a feature article. FAs may lose their FA status over time as the criteria become stricter.
The To-Do list becomes an important tool when the objective is to elevate an article to FA status. The To-Do list will focus the work that needs to be done on the article to achieve FA status.
The authors note that the FA elevation process is a quality assurance exercise done by volunteers without a boss. However, there is a self-governance process involving rules, monitoring, collective-choice arrangements, and conflict-management that is very fascinating.

Finally, I visited the WikiMedia Projects page. While familiar with many of the projects, I decided to learn more about Wikinews.
I was unaware of Wikinews before visiting this page. However, I think it is an especially important project in a world where many people cannot trust the news agencies in their own regions. Or, where the news in their region may be completely ignored. I decided to look at the news account of the Olympic torch lighting .
The content was similar to the coverage on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). I didn't read anything I didn't already know. However, it had been reported on CBC that the coverage of the protestor was never carried in the Chinese media. I wonder how many Chinese could access this Wikinews article to learn about the protestor.
I like the opinions page that accompanies each news article allowing readers to add their own thoughts. I note that there is no reporter's name on this article and the article's history page doesn't reveal full identies of the authors. I hope that there is enough anonymity assured to Wikinews reporters who could be putting themselves at risk for contributing.
I feel that I really learned a lot from this week's readings.