A Defense of Wikipedia - Crowdsoucring the World's Knowledge

Wikipedia is one of the largest Crowdsourced projects on the planet. With 3 million plus articles in English and millions more in other languages, it is the work of many people working tirelessly to share information and knowledge. It is also one of the most visible crowdsourced projects out there as it is usually the top result in your searches.

Wikipedia has received criticism since its inception almost ten year ago. With the idea that anyone could write and edit articles, the trustworthiness (truthiness as Stephen Colbert would say) was called into question. Many teachers will not accept research sourced from Wikipedia because of their concern that it would be incorrect. I hope this articles encourages the wider adoption of the Wiki and convinces people of its usefulness while still being realistic about its shortcomings.

In Defense of Collaborative Editing
The amount of articles that are added every year to Wikipedia are astounding. To have a small team of encyclopedia writers start from scratch would be an impossible task, yet hundreds of thousands of articles are added each year to Wikipedia. How is this possible?

According to the Internet World Stats page almost 2 billion people are online and while only a fraction of those are writing and editing for Wikipedia it divides the labor enough to make it possible for anyone to contribute.

Wikipedia has received criticism from media sources, comedians, teachers, and almost everyone else because there is the perception that anyone can just log in and within 10 seconds make themselves the President of the USA or make 2+2=5.

The best way to convince you otherwise is to encourage you to go online and propose a new article or edit an existing one.

Are you back? Are your hopes of being cited as the inventor of the light bulb or married to a supermodel dashed? If like me, you have submitted an article or changes for review, you will soon either have your change rejected or be told to modify it to meet the Wiki's high standards for submission. There are people in the community who contribute primarily by reviewing changes submitted for approval and they do an excellent job of catching errors.

Reliability of Wikipedia Articles
While there have been scandals and pranks, they are eventually corrected. In fact, when Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica were compared side by side, the number of errors found in each were similar. In fact there are some errors n the EB that have been corrected by Wikipedia.

Rest assured, if you are going to Wikipedia to learn or research a topic that is pretty much set in stone you have nothing to worry about. If you are trying to learn a skill or concept then you should be good to go. However, if you are looking at something related to Pop Culture you are much more likely to stumble upon a point of contention. If there are errors it may be because there is dispute about certain historical events but even the controversy is often discussed in the article.

Out of concern that Wikipedia's articles were not trustworthy for student consumption, alternative movements like CK-12 textbooks and Free High School Science Texts emerged. These are peer reviewed textbooks free for anyone to teach and/or learn from. Additionally, CK-12 has the unique feature of being able to customize your textbooks for your class so some topics are there while others are not.

Diversity always drives evolution and Wikipedia and the learning community as a whole can only benefit from alternative sources of learning. I hope more teachers will compare their trusted textbook or resource with Wikipedia to see how accurate and high quality of a resource it is.

Freedom of Information
No one group or person should control information. This was the premise behind a free press because  history shows that dictators and rulers alike have known that to control information is to control the culture and society. In the incredible work by Myles Horton and Paulo Freire We Make The Road by Walking, Freire remarks that in Brazil, the revolutionaries would come but the oppressive education and bias textbooks/lessons would remain.

We cannot let movements like Wikipedia die out. They are our defense against tyranny and as Thomas Jefferson remarked, "freedom of the press is not meant to protect the right to publish, it is to protect the right of the citizen to know."

Appropriately Using Wikipedia in the Classroom
I know I have referenced Sugata Mitra's Ted talk before, but the results are just too powerful to ignore. Students will learn if they are given the tools and time to do so. Rather than directly instruct the students all the time (or ever), why not teach them how to use the information on the web and how to discern what is useful and reliable. Many teachers use the Internet to research for lessons, why not shift that responsibility of learning to the students?

Wikipedia is a resource, an incredibly valuable resource with flaws. Yet, it is the perfect place for students to get their feet wet. When they leave the classroom walls in a few years (or even that evening) they are going to plug back into the Web to learn and they will most likely click on Wikipedia. Knowing how to navigate the web wisely is one of the best skills we can pass on to our students.

Closing Thoughts

1.  Support the movement. The project is always in need of contributions both financial and of time.
• Wikipedia is Free to everyone (i.e. Free as in Speech and as in Pizza) which embodies the World Wide Web's founding principles of connecting people and sharing data and information.
2. Wikipedia is useful as a jumping off point. Sometimes the articles are confusing or too technical but the link references at the bottom or something mentioned in the body of the article often are extremely useful to guide one in the next steps for research.
3. The controversy is important as people need to be critical of their media. I am extremely grateful to sites like Snopes, that encourage critical thinking and independently scour the web for errors and myths. Don't believe everything that you read or only read one source no matter where it is coming from.

Favorite experiences with Wikipedia? Disagree? Leave a comment!

Google Document Updates

Just a quick update, Google Documents received an update making it all the more useful in the classroom. Of most interest to Math and Science teachers is the ability to insert an equation.

Previously you could create an equation in Word or Open Office's Writer but when you uploaded the document to Google Docs the equation would turn into a blurry unreadable picture. That problem has been resolved.

Note: You will not notice these changes in your old documents, you must create a new one.

To use this feature:

1. Open Google Documents
2. Click on Create New
3. Click on Document
4. To add mathematical equations click on "Insert"
5. Click on "Equation"
6. You will then see new options for you to create fractions, mathematical/scientific symbols.

Enjoy!

Creating Video Tutorials for your Class Part 1

Welcome back, in the last post, I referred to video tutorials as an incredible asset to your classroom and some of they benefits you would see from using them. I have taught with and without them and, I can truly say that this is worth your time.

Why should you consider making video tutorials:
If you were to ask educators what they consider the most time consuming and frustrating part of their classroom, I believe they would overwhelmingly say that it is the lecturing. The preparation and gathering of the facts, the creation of a delivery method (whiteboard, powerpoint, demonstration, etc), blank stares from students, repetition and hopes of retention, wear and tear on your voice and mind from repeating yourself 3-6 times a day, and the list continues. When I have surveyed teachers as to why they continue to lecture, they say it is the best way to deliver a large amount of content.

This is true, there is no faster way to deliver content. However, studies as well as my own classroom experience continually show that lecturing is one of the most difficult ways for students to learn content. Why is lecturing such a pervasive practice? Consider that up until the last few hundred years, content was very expensive or scarce. Either you had access to a book (which required the ability to read) or you heard a lecture from someone who knew what they were talking about. This practice has continued in all levels of education around the world even though the environment has changed.  Content (books/Internet) is so pervasive now that the time has come to rethink why and how we lecture.

With so little time in the school year do we really want to spend 50-75%  of our time doing that which the Internet or textbooks can do already? But I can hear the concerns, that there is so much poor or erroneous material out there and that there is no replacement for a discussion between teacher and students to go more in depth or clear up misconceptions. I agree 100% with both of these points and I believe video tutorials is not a replacement for the teacher in the classroom but a method of freeing up the educator to personalize and encourage more in depth understanding.

However, there is in my opinion, a right way and a wrong way to implement them into your classroom. This post will talk about how to create the tutorial and the next will describe my suggestions for how to use them.

How to create video tutorials:
Creating educational video tutorials has been around for as long as the medium has existed. Yet in the last couple of years, the cost of doing so has become practically free. Inspired by Patrick Yurick, Karl Fisch, and Don Herbert I began to create Video Tutorials for my classroom.

What you need:

• Presentation Software: Open Office Impress (free) Microsoft Office Powerpoint ($$$)
• Screen Capture Software: Camstudio (free) or Camtasia ($$$ but has additional features such as editing)
• Optional:
• Webcam ($20-50, it should have a microphone built in)
• http://www.youtube.com/my_webcam (for video capture)
• WinFF (free file converter)

You have two options for creating the video and it depends on how and what kind of content you are delivering. 

Screen Capture:

1. Create a Powerpoint presentation with the content that you are going to deliver. I would encourage you to add animations that allow you to control when the content appears on the screen.
2. Start Camstudio
3. Start the presentation so it takes up the whole screen.
4. Push F8 (the keyboard shortcut to start recording with Camstudio)
5. Begin narrating through your presentation as if you were lecturing to your students, clicking through the presentation.
6. If you need to start over, push F10 to cancel and start over from step 3.
7. If you need to pause push F8 and again to unpause.
8. When you are done push F9.
9. Camstudio will then ask you to save, then it will take some time to process, and finally show you a preview. If you are happy with this then congratulations you have just completed your first video tutorial!