www.nickhodge.com

Microsoft is spon­sor­ing The Extraordin­ary Every­day Lives Show on The Pod­cast Net­work for 6 epis­odes as an exper­i­ment, and I really like the format that Uncle Dave Wal­lace and Uncle Mike Sey­fang have created.

Epis­ode 044 is with South Aus­tralian Teacher, Al Upton, on the Order for Clos­ure for his miniLe­gends blog. I fear that pro­cess may have hit the innov­a­tion fan. I hope that pro­cess learns from the shut­down of the miniLe­gends work. For the bene­fit of all chil­dren who are liv­ing daily in a digital age.

It is teach­ers like Al the who exhibit enthu­si­asm and com­mit­ment to his stu­dents and improv­ing learn­ing makes the dif­fer­ence. That is what is remembered.

Ok, so this kid gets PR from the school after copy­ing not Wike­pe­dia, but Myth­busters (Screened epis­ode 11, sea­son 1)

C’mon teach­ers: mod­ern pop-culture is not defined by merely “the internets”.

Oh, and a big thanks to Sue Waters: the per­son with the best job title I know of: Aquacul­tur­al­ist. Evid­ently, Mahi-mahi are smart fish.

Laurel Pap­worth has some inter­est­ing com­ments on generation-Y (digi-kids) and the dis­con­nec­ted nature of our cur­rent gov­ern­ments. Laurel’s post ref­er­ences this art­icle in the Sydney Morn­ing Her­ald (Laurel: the reason why Fair­fax doesn’t believe in the long tail is that it hasn’t worked out its busi­ness model yet)

Hav­ing spent two days with a selec­tion of pas­sion­ate Vic­torian School Prin­cipals, I am more con­cerned about our Gov­ern­mental policies and the silent digital major­ity than those on the ground in the classroom.

The You­Tube present­a­tion at the begin­ning of her post puts stark num­bers on the story from The World Is Flat.

Thomas Fried­man was in Aus­tralia a few weeks ago, and spent time with both sides of Aus­tralian Fed­eral Polit­ics. I hope he was able to talk and explain that Edu­ca­tion and Band­width are crit­ical to the future of this nation. If being a Nation is that import­ant anymore.

I am going to extend Thomas’ equation:

CQ + PQ + EQ > IQ

EQ is emo­tional quo­tient, emo­tional intel­li­gence or emo­tional matur­ity. You can­not teach EQ from books. Pas­sion­ate Teach­ers provide a role model for our kids for the future.

Let’s hope the gen­er­a­tion after us repairs the mis­takes we’ve made.

Wikipedia.org. Ensure your school is in Wiki­pe­dia. Under­stand the social aspects of Wikis, and the rules related to Wiki­pe­dia entries.

Microsoft Breathe Life. Microsoft Australia’s start­ing point for Education.

linkedin.com. Pro­fes­sional Social Net­work­ing. Start here.

Live.com search (Advanced search fea­tures) Use the Advanced fea­tures of search to ego-surf.

flickr.com. Social shar­ing of pho­tos with folk­sonomy tagging

del.icio.us Search blogs, user-created tags for the folk­sonomy tags.

sixtyminutes.ninemsn.com.au. Recent story

Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion. Excel­lent dis­cus­sion of Digital Gen­er­a­tion Gap

danah boyd. Explor­ing the Digital Gen­er­a­tion gap; formal research papers.

I Can Has Cheese­bur­ger. Fun and inter­est­ing use of language

edublogs.org. Cre­ate your own blog, or blog for a classroom.

Finally, the present­a­tion from 17^th May 2007 and 22^nd May 2007.

This is a pub­lic feed of what I am watch­ing in the Edu­ca­tion Tech­no­logy space.

Flickr Group for all images.

del.icio.us search for all blog posts from Jimmy’s Trip

The fol­low­ing is a blog-best-effort tran­script of Jimmy Wales in Mel­bourne on the 27^th April 2007. This is not a ver­batim tran­script. This post is purely a tran­script of the con­ver­sa­tion, not the opin­ion of the author.

This blog post, and Flickr images are licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons License:

This work is licensed under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 Aus­tralia License.

With Mark Pesce

Mark intros Jimmy again. Been a long day.

Cas­ual con­ver­sa­tion. Peer pro­duc­tions, peer questions.

Mark will ask 2 ques­tions, then alternate.

Q: Get­ting over the hump of ini­tial people

JW: 5–10 people make a wiki com­mit­ted to com­ing in and check­ing up. Fee for entry is 5 com­mit­ted people. eg: swahili lan­guage wiki­pe­dia; Sanjo from Tan­zania. star­ted on it. Wrote first 75 art­icles. Blogged+emailed. slowly built a com­munity. Taken off. Past 1000 art­icle threshold. One per­son pas­sion­ate. Doing the social stuff.

Suc­cess­ful wiki greater than the con­tent, its all the social phe­nomenon that’s important.

Its lead­er­ship, and per­sist­ence. Lead­er­ship: phrase : ser­vant lead­er­ship, idea, lead the com­munity not by gen­eral Command+control; fol­low­ing the com­munity. Role in coach­ing, guiding.

Another example, wikia: furry. About sub­cul­ture of furry about people who like to dress like anim­als. More of them than you can ima­gine. Furry wiki star­ted quickly, within first first month (green­reaper). First month 100 editor. 30–40 reg­u­lars. 5–10 admins, Whole com­munity in the world. (editor: now I’m scared). Needed a place to make it hap­pen. (editor: more evan­gel­ism for wikia)

Thank you for not email around word doc­u­ments, do it in a wiki.

Q: This trip, in South Africa and India. First world and third world coun­try schools. Wiki­pe­dia and Edu­ca­tion> what is it becom­ing in the 21^st Century

JW: is a tra­di­tion­al­ist in the man­ner of school­ing. Kids using com­puters, tech­no­logy, peer learn­ing: extremely valu­able: teacher-student rela­tion­ship: 1:1 There is some­thing spe­cial: tech­no­logy NOT com­pet­ing with teach­ers. Free up time for teach­ers. Stand­ing in front of a classroom doing your own video: you can be replaced.

In many uni­ver­sit­ies: huge 300 people lec­ture ses­sions: not valu­able; get most enter­tain­ing pro­fessor: teacher value is 1:1 real time dia­gnostic assess­ment. Sit down with an indi­vidual, not mass classroom. Routine learn­ing done in other ways.

Daugh­ter embar­rassed him Cambodia/Kampuchea 6 years old. Spin­ning the world around. Home school­ing. Indi­vidu­al­ized instruc­tion. (editor: hur­ump from audi­ence)

Q: Andrew Wilson: Man­aging Fire in Vic Gov’t Use of tech­no­logy in a multiple-stakeholder world.

JW: remove the tight hier­archy; wiki is more than just the soft­ware; its the social side. Removal of vot­ing for edit­or­ial decisions. Get­ting people from diverse back­grounds and choices, listen­ing to all people, 70/30 vot­ing ignores 100% of the 30%‘s input. That’s not good.

Must be broad com­munity support.

JW: Watch the old movie, 12 angry men, premise: murder trial. Set in Jury room. Begin­ning from nearly all con­vict; then pick­ing apart each of the indi­vidual argu­ments. By the end of the film, vote to acquit.

When a wiki is work­ing well, and healthy, process/group : one per­son can change the world. Wiki a great tool for struc­tur­ing how the argu­ment is placed. For­ums = flame war, wiki is much more col­lab­or­at­ive. Con­sensus doc­u­ment needs to sur­vive: need to find some­thing that all agree on.

Q: Mark, rebuilt copy­right regime rebuilt from scratch

US, copy­right law, by default everything you write is under copy­right. Now essen­tially uni­ver­sal. Done just before the inter­net became “big”. Now you have to do more stuff to make some­thing into the pub­lic domain.

Think of the lots of stuff that they don’t care about copy­right; it is by default. The hampers our abil­ity to share. Can be done cas­u­ally with a statement.

JW: let’s have regime where there is no default copyright.

Some people have moral rights/economic rights to retain copyright.

How long should it last? Copy­right has exten­ded to absurd lengths. Not driven my organsi­ation, done by movie industry. Long life IP assets. JW’s view is “it doesn’t care”. So, Dis­ney = 200 years that’s fine; col­lat­eral dam­age in other spheres.

Now, its one size fits all. Recent AU rul­ing copy­right of a design of a boat was func­tional not artistic. Dif­fer­ent act for design pro­tec­tion (from news­pa­per art­icle). Good idea: mul­tiple options. Bene­fi­cial for soft­ware: life+90 years?? reas­on­able. Soft­ware author? Life of the com­puter. Eco­nomic life of soft­ware less than 90 years; Old ver­sion of Excel into the free soft­ware move­ment to make it better.

After a short of period of time, re-register and small fee — lets many things fall into pub­lic domain by default. Many pieces that are eco­nom­ic­ally feas­ible; eg: put into wiki world.

Cur­rent pro­cess is ardu­ous, track­ing down the rights.

JW: Pat­ents: Soft­ware pat­ents are a bad idea. No opin­ion of drug industry. In soft­ware industry, pat­ents are defens­ive rather than offens­ive. Pat­ents on the web restric­ted to 6 months. (editor: JW’s open­ing bid on time, that’s all) Pat­ents are a real threat to wiki­pe­dia vs. copy­right. With pat­ents, viol­a­tion: not sure if you are viol­at­ing it (sub­mar­ine pat­ent). Inter­est­ing polit­ical issue

Q: APRA: Opin­ion. 3–4 Tb of server on songs. From teen­agers. Is it a mute point in regards to copy­right as the younger generation.

What is fair use? JW has no opin­ion on how music per­formers are paid, distributed.

JW buys from iTunes. Tech­no­logy is going to make shar­ing easy; “cas­sette tapes and video” is going to kill com­pan­ies. Record and timeshift, has been fought against by con­tent cre­ation industry.

DRM is a stu­pid idea, cf: Steve Jobs, Pub­lish­ing Com­pany. Get­ting in the way of ease of use for users.

Q: Mark; every­one will be fam­ous for 15Mb. Bio-page, has some­thing he doesn’t want. JW dinged for edit­ing own page. We can edit our own page, com­munity will fix. Too much truth?

JW: bio­graph­ies of liv­ing people is the toughest ques­tion. cf; Queen Vic­toria, she’s dead so she doesn’t care about her wiki­pe­dia entry.

So, how do we deal with bio­graph­ies of liv­ing people? Thought­ful man­ner, sens­it­iv­ity. Talk page vs. yell at you.

Not every­one is about white­wash­ing page. Solu­tion is to become a more open, pub­lic per­son about your life. Fam­ous people, cer­tain things are known — nar­rat­ives grow around these stor­ies, but only a part of the real story.

Jimmy Wales want to sail around the world. He has an interest in it. Not on his wikipedia.

Wiki­pe­dia is power­ful of google.

Oth­ers are so “over” the inter­net: they don’t care. More and more art­icles, less and less fam­ous people.

Dis­cus­sion now is what level of not­ab­il­ity for wiki­pe­dia entry.

There are bio­graphy guidelines. danah boyd huge impact on her field. cf. being not­able for being on Foxnews vs. aca­demic work. Watch­ing the debate on see­ing if you should be deleted.

Worse than find­ing your are unim­port­ant; but also talk about dele­tion. Mech­an­ism for blank­ing from external view.

Cat­egor­ies are prob­lem­atic. Tag there or not. Nuance in text, can­not in cat­egory. Crim­in­als for instance. Who should be there or not? Politi­cian caught driv­ing DUI. Some will cat­egor­ise as crim­inal. Its bin­ary on/off. Tricky. Cat­egor­ies are provocative.

Q: Mark, pleas­ure to spend a week with JW. JW, Brian Balendorf, Tim Berners-Lee: low ego people. Ego beat out of you?

JW: early incid­ent in wiki­pe­dia in Span­ish; dis­pute over impres­sion JW was going to put advert­ising in Wiki­pe­dia. Oppon­ents were trick­ing people. JW overly com­bat­ive. Viol­ated the first rule of wiki­pe­dia, assume good faith. Need to explain yourself.

Don’t have an argu­ment with someone for the point of the argu­ment, but in a different

Brian: intro­duced to Richard Bran­son as “the per­son who freed the inter­net from Microsoft”, JW says its true.

In open source world, win vs. right.

Can­not be a boss and be a jerk. Com­pan­ies won’t sur­vive. With high level people, they can be jerks, and the employ­ees will sur­vive. With volun­teers its dif­fer­ent; you have to be as nice as possible.

Flickr Group for all images.

del.icio.us search for all blog posts from Jimmy’s Trip

The fol­low­ing is a blog-best-effort tran­script of Jimmy Wales in Mel­bourne on the 27^th April 2007. This is not a ver­batim transcript.

This blog post, and Flickr images are licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons License:

This
work is licensed under a
Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 Aus­tralia License.

After-lunch Panel Discussion

Gary intro­duces Mark Pesce: VRML. Author 5 books, “How Tech­no­logy is Trans­form­ing our Age”

Also on New Invent­ors, 2003–2006 AFTRS.

Mark: The Incon­veni­ence of Truth: Mark Twain quote in relation

Peer data, with peer data.

Lots of ways of gen­er­at­ing knowledge

21^st cen­tury: what’s you know become who do you trust

Sys­tems of know­ledge gen­er­a­tion: com­pare and con­trast the outcomes.

Simple word: kangaroo: wiki­pe­dia, first para clear and con­cise. Tax­onom­ist, zoolo­gist. Gold stand­ard. Wikipedia’s author­it­at­ive voice is col­lab­or­at­ive. Wrong fix it, look at his­tory, look for bad data. Dis­trib­uted authority.

Brit­an­nica: second para­graph, go online to buy full license. 72 hours of going online: serv­ers col­lapsed based on demand: higher band­width, serv­ers etc. 1999 — con­sist­ently lost money in 1999. Behind a wall, $6.99/month — not a dis­trib­uted author­ity. Elites con­trol access to the edit­ing of data.

Other ways to do peer pro­duc­tion. Cit­izen­dium (sp?), attempt­ing to con­tact Mark. Attempt­ing to dif­fer­en­ti­ate. Seems like a com­munity of recog­nised experts. Its out there and interesting.

“After the flood” : stated neut­ral­ity of wiki­pe­dia was social­ist sec­u­lar­ist claptrap: wiki­pe­dia, con­ser­va­pe­dia. Trust­worthy encyc­lo­pe­dia. Ori­gins sec­tion based on cre­ation sci­ence. Pro­cess of pro­duc­tion same as wiki­pe­dia, but out­come is dif­fer­ent. Truth, justice and beauty does not come from just sharing.

Uncyc­lo­pe­dia; (lots of LOL) Frig­gen Hugh Mouse == kangaroo. Themes that show up, its funny. Wikia pur­chased it. Another kind of knowledge/peer pro­duc­tion. Com­edy. Cool.

Medi­cine, can’t leave it up to mere mor­tals. Top Head­lines example. LOL (missed screen) Peer pro­duced medi­cine. April Fools example. http://whoissick.org/ peer pro­duced epi­demi­ology  Who is report­ing sick in google maps.  Where is this one going. Really inter­est­ing

“All know­ing is doing, and all doing is knowing.”

Edu­ca­tion is chan­ging massively due to know­ledge, not just the pure IT.

Know­ledge > Elites know know­ledge is power, and it sub­verts the hier­archy. Spe­cial interests are also in play. Know­ledge shar­ing, and free stuff gets stronger: cries of elites and spe­cial interests.

21^st cen­tury: war as forces tug against each other.

Panel intro:

Jimmy Wales, Mar­tin Wildes, Sarah Phil­lips, Ran­dal Strong, Rod­ney Sparkes, James Farmer, Daniel Inger­son, Derek Whitehead

Daniel: edu­ca­tion is a social thing. Chicago: effect of mov­ing schools on stu­dents. 25 people that moved to bet­ter schools didn’t do bet­ter: the desire (pas­sion) to do bet­ter was crit­ical. Stu­dents today: how do we turn that engage­ment into bet­ter edu­ca­tion, how do we get the sys­tems to under­stand that? Per­son­al­ised learn­ing vs. stand­ard­ised test­ing. Over next 10 years: explod­ing of what inform­a­tion is recor­ded: pro­cesses of learn­ing, not just the end res­ult. Look­ing at what stu­dents are doing, which will change assess­ment. First ele­ments of the web where R/W. Con­cern of con­trol an issue in Syd. High­lights quote form Jimmy: account­ab­il­ity not gate­keep­ing. Daniel is pro­du­cing s/w to do this.

Mar­tin Wildes: super­club­splus. MIT, all aca­demic con­tent delivered free online. Why MIT? Qual­ity of edu­ca­tion exper­i­ence is between the stu­dents + lec­tur­ers. Its the pas­sion! The enthusiasm!

Con­tent con­trolled by 6–12 yo chil­dren (by+for) in a UK site. (missed site) Gives chil­dren a voice, and some­thing to say. Trends toward to user gen­er­ated con­tent: peer to peer par­ti­cip­at­ive approach. Intu­it­ive media work­ing with this. Even actu­ar­ies are think­ing about user gen­er­ated content.

Chal­lenge: power com­munit­ies for young chil­dren: integ­rity, extend learn­ing. Legit­im­ise these into our insti­tu­tions, K-12 and

Derek White­head: Swin­burne Univ; Derek here as copy­right officer and lib­rar­ian. Lib­rar­i­ans like wiki­pe­dia? yes and no. lots to love. well organ­ised cur­rent access­ible widely know. Not all lib­rar­i­ans like wiki­pe­dia, lack of author­ity, volat­il­ity (eg defin­tion) Lib­rar­i­ans are ambi­val­ent about inform­a­tion demo­cracy. Dicho­tomy. Every has the right to inform­a­tion, but must get order and con­trol into the situ­ation (LOL) Life is google’d (google can be used as any part of speech). Whole web as the ref­er­ence source. Google search on the web, take the first. Wiki­pe­dia is way more QA’d than the first/random google search. Before, once “just ask mum”.  Google is about the same, Wiki­pe­dia is bet­ter as its com­munity con­trolled. Wiki­pe­dia is what all Lib­rar­i­ans have been look­ing for.

Rod­ney Sparkes: eworks: voca­tion education/TAFE sec­tor. Wide range of styles and types: included those with lim­ited skills for self-directed learn­ing. 70% are part-time and mature age works. Untapped poten­tial in the peer to peer world. Capa­city to self-directed learn­ing is going to be toughest chal­lenge. Imme­di­ate impact in the area of teach­ing: Peer to Peer impact on teach­ers will be greatest impact and keep­ing teach­ing qual­ity high. Takes the informal approach into al little more formal. Trans­lat­ing skills into the online envir­on­ments is crit­ical. Learn­ing objects. Mak­ing con­tent avail­able to oth­ers. How to incent con­trib­ut­ors to make them add knowledge.

How do we ensure every­one has learn­ing skills? Smartest people are the wealth­ier people. Tech­no­logy is every­where; how to we cre­ate eco­nomic mod­els for com­munity rights. Is teach­ing in the 21^st cen­tury illegal due to recent Digital Laws. How about our cul­ture know­ledge. Writ­ing is not the only way: digital storytelling: peer to peer model: video+sound etc. Value of cul­ture of know­ledge is appreciated.

Ran­dall Strong: Mul­ti­me­dia Vic­toria: Edu­ca­tion, how do gov’t policy people think: dejavu to 1993/1994. Net­work ICT’d dis­rupt­ing tech­no­logy: web2 is the next dis­rupt­ive tech­no­logy. 1990s we under estim­ated impacts. This time, the gov can­not under­es­tim­ate the impact. Now want Vic­toria into second­life now. Oppor­tun­ity: web2 open innov­a­tion plat­form for the coun­try. Exploit the other 99% of the know­ledge in the world for local use; effect journ­al­ism. Digital TV: make it, now watch it. DESTRA “‘yooph’ gen­er­ated TV”. Teacher gen­er­ated con­tent; stu­dent gen­er­ated con­tent from/for kids. Web2 dis­rup­tion to drive pro­ductiv­ity. Threats: exper­i­ment­a­tion; that has to hap­pen again in the eco­nomy. Basic ADSL will not drive this in AU. Con­verged net­works need Sym­metry to Write. Deeper fibre into the economy. Vic EDU fibre to the school. Gov’t will react to excesses, You­tubes: why, wer­ri­bee example. US Con­gress; throttle $ to schools who use web2. 1994 now excess: bil­lion people are already using it. Inter­net meas­ured and monitored, will hap­pen quicker. MMVic is think­ing through this stuff.

James Farmer: Edub­logs and The Age,  pissed. Drunk. Intox­ic­ated. On the know­ledge. Gor­ging on inform­a­tion, binge know­ledging. Don’t abuse the know­ledge. 100 years ago, rote learn­ing, inform­a­tion trans­fer. Since then, research, John Dewey etc. Old skool school­ing don’t work. Con­ver­sa­tion and inter­ac­tion are bet­ter. For­get modes of teach­ing, just jump on the know­ledge. Just fol­low the IT. ICT. (C for com­mu­nic­a­tion is silent). Con­tent, con­tent, con­tent. Chal­lenge is to get over the orgy of know­ledge to add social side. JF sick of learn­ing objects, wikis, pod­casts.… less can be more!

Sarah Phil­lips, Deakin Uni­ver­sity: wiki­pe­dia for speech? Free encyc­lo­pe­dia is a noble idea. Essay topic to trivia ques­tions. Answers don’t provide a basis of cred­ible argu­ment. Online van­dal­ism. In an ideal world, people don’t cross check. PR stu­dent, in social media, PR people can­not edit in wiki­pe­dia. Peer pro­duced learn­ing should per­mit PR people from com­mu­nic­a­tions pro­fes­sional. Does this rule apply to the PR team at Wikipedia?

Q: Sarah; as PR prac­ti­tioner, can I write an article?

Jimmy Wales: broader rules from com­munity, con­flict of interest edit­ing. When you have a per­sonal interest in this. Must identify openly, post in dis­cus­sion page openly, present inform­a­tion on themselves.

Prob­lem we have, PR unpro­fes­sion­als who do exist out there. Come in mind­lessly without openly say­ing who they are. Quite dan­ger­ous beha­viour, and uneth­ical for the PR com­munity. Show the respect. Idea not a free-for-all; there are people on the other side who spent time.

Cor­por­a­tions may have entit­ies who are paid and poten­tially not fair: but remem­ber the com­munity norms and values.

Q: Rod­ney: cf: News Ltd Pur­chase of Myspace.

JW: Myspace skep­tic; Myspace too much advert­ising and spam­ming, core mar­ket like facebook.

Wiki­pe­dia is owned by a non-profit — so its not for sale. Con­tent is (cc) anyway!

Q: (on pod­cast, sur­vive death of uni­verse). Own­er­ship of Know­ledge in Edu­ca­tion domain. Inform­a­tion is not shared freely between edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions; act­ively dis­cour­age shar­ing as they are threats to each other. Shar­ing the source, won’t hap­pen until © policies are solved.

Inform­a­tion is not open. Ran­dall: inform­a­tion should be shared, not a formal policy. Gov’t can lead by example. Does Gov’t use (cc) model? Crit­ical mass of user gen­er­ated content.

Vic­toria, soft­ware IP; changed default model where IP resides: in the industry, gov’t should not be in the game of mak­ing and exploit­ing IP — commercial.

Grow­ing band of people who will drive this.

Mark: peer pro­duced draw­ing pro­ject. All the way to the AFTRS board to get approval for OS software.

James: slightly dif­fer­ent in the uni­ver­sity world.

Mar­tin: the stu­dents will drive the uni­ver­sity with their own learn­ing net­works in place. Stu­dents will con­tinue their tools and net­works already in place. Edu­ca­tion is bey­ond the institution.

Mark: peer learn­ing — pushed out­side the school. Is the school the locus of learn­ing in the 21^st century?

Mar­tin: UK exper­i­ence, super­club­splus; social net­work­ing; 120,000 6–12 years of age. Learn­ing in school, out­side: logs enga­ging gen­er­at­ing con­tent + annot­at­ing, friends, primary out­side school con­fines. Innov­at­ive teach­ers: any tool or tech­no­logy. Cre­at­ive and ori­ginal ways.

Q: QLD fire+rescue: Jimmy a cit­izen of the world. Soft­ware design, social education/design.

Law Pro­fessor at Har­vard. Ten­sion between guards and pris­on­ers, due to escape. Used a wiki to pro­duce a neut­ral view of what happened. Both sides never agree, so wiki was used to find the source of the conflict.

In gen­eral, using social tools at a young age, to teach at a young age from TV. How to have a con­struct­ive con­ver­sa­tion aimed at a mutu­ally agree­able end. vs. TV is A vs B style to make the other side appear evil. (editor: need to cre­ate a Jimmy Wales — Microsoft heal­ing wiki)

Q: Increas­ing com­fort of use, down­side on KPIs and measurement

Mark: dis­trib­ute author­ity, you are dis­trib­ut­ing expert­ise. Dis­trib­uted model of assessment.

Mar­tin: expert­ise model is inter­est­ing. Expert­ise is about exper­i­ence, not know­ledge. Organ­isa­tions to grow expert­ise need to provide the power of the com­munity in devel­op­ment of the expert­ise, and dis­trib­ute it around — includ­ing assessment.

Philo­soph­ic­ally true: demon­strate com­pet­en­cies, not just what they remember.

James: com­pet­en­cies: pain with this word. Edu­ca­tion sys­tem K-12+University, seg­ment wheat from chaff. Nice com­fort­able soci­ety (class).  School — social aspects is rub­bish with out­dated assess­ment pro­cesses and large exams.

Rod­ney: employ­ers decide in voca­tional side. Demon­strate in a work con­text (port­fo­lio) Qual­i­fic­a­tions only one aspect.

Sarah: all assess­ment in this final term is work-oriented cf. exam. Term of learn­ing for 3 hours of pres­sure. Into the com­munity is far more bene­fi­cial in final exam.

Daniel: who is doing the assess­ment? Peers doing the assess­ment, shifts the power base to the community.

Q: Col­lab­or­at­ive. Uni­ver­sity had a model more advanced than the stu­dents in a Master’s degree. Gen­er­a­tional gap in learn­ing styles.

Daniel: Doug Brown has a spec­tac­u­lar present­a­tion on cul­tural change. Teach­ers vs. stu­dents per­spect­ive. Research — pub­lic­a­tion can be peer and self.

Rod­ney: are uni­ver­sit­ies the best example of col­lab­or­at­ive learning/peer learning.

(next: Fireside chat with Jimmy)

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The fol­low­ing is a blog-best-effort tran­script of Jimmy Wales in Mel­bourne on the 27^th April 2007. This is not a ver­batim transcript.

This blog post, and Flickr images are licensed under the Cre­at­ive Com­mons License:

This
work is licensed under a
Cre­at­ive Com­mons Attri­bu­tion 2.5 Aus­tralia License.

Garry Put­land: wel­come. Apple might get Pod­cast from Adelaide up today. Didn’t they invent the tech­no­logy? Garry happy as he got a photo with the Chaser guys for his kids. Lucky! About 200 attendees.

Auntie Joy: wel­come from ori­ginal land own­ers and custodians.

Garry: educationau.edu.au Chal­len­ging How Know­ledge is created.  Ms danah boyd com­ing in Septem­ber; digital gen­er­a­tion focus. must remem­ber to come.  Microsoft must get involved with these guys, espe­cially as they map out the future of learn­ing in the r/w digital nat­ive culture.

Kat­rina Reynen: Assist­ant Gen­eral Man­ager, Innov­a­tion Branch, Vic DET. List­ing com­pan­ies here. Lots. How Vic­toria takes IT for­ward. Excit­ing chal­lenge: how young people con­nect and learn. Most wired and global of gen­er­a­tions. Teach­ers integ­rate tech­no­logy: critical/reflective think­ing. Mov­ing bey­ond textbook/blackboard roles. Teach­ers are now advisers and learners themselves.

Stu­dents: non­lin­ear; links, not nar­rat­ive. Images > text. Net­works greater than local

eg: Andrew Douch: Wan­ganui Park Sec­ond­ary School:, Vic­toria pod­cast­ing @ school. Study on the bus. Kids thinks its cool as other think they are listen­ing to music.  Kids also cre­at­ing pod­casts and are publishing.

Let­ting go as teach­ers: kids are bey­ond us.

ICT trans­formed learn­ing; con­nec­tion across the globe. enthu­si­asm for ipods, games, web2 ser­vices, enorm­ous potential

Use tech — new ways of learn­ing; col­lab­or­at­ive tech eg: wiki­pe­dia. Vic­toria ICT is integ­ral into schools, ICT helps stu­dents create.

Kahoots; pod­casts, tv+radio pro­grams today . Mashup machin­ima; Kahoots + bluescreen with kids act­ing in from of kahoots cre­ated 3D world.. Must mix media, and uses all sides of the brain.

edit­or­ial note: ICT > geeks cut­ting code Microsoft people! Get Web2 or get out.

Learn­ing in a new mode, learn­ing @ the centre. Vic Gov’t AU$130m. to ICT. Note­book to teach­ers and stu­dents. 1:1 learning?

Garry: Jiimmy’s visit: all humans have access to all know­ledge. Skills: net­worker, con­nec­tions are import­ant where know­ledge is rap­idly grow­ing in large net­works. Has attrac­ted media attention.

Jimmy Wales:

Aus­tralia is really big! Perth Adelaide Perth Sydney Melbourne.

Mel­bunn as spelling of Mel­bourne

Cost of text­books to zero, soft­ware towards zero, cost of com­puters down

Learn­ing impact has been going on from 10 years

Digital divide is going to reduce due to above (ref: Microsoft US$3)

Charles van Doren, encyc­lo­pe­dia should be rad­ical (subversive)

Wiki­pe­dia: free access to sum of all human knowledge.

Mel­bunn beat Sydney in % of people edit­ing wiki­pe­dia entry.

Greater per­cent­age of the board from out­side US

Wiki­me­dia is a tiny non-profit org. US$1m last year, US$2m last year. Tra­di­tional spend­ing on band­width and serv­ers (mostly serv­ers) Sup­por­ted by small dona­tions as it is a char­ity. Dona­tions from 50 dif­fer­ent countries.

Wikia: new organ­isa­tion (Jimmy is Chair­man), book, work or com­munity people might want to build. GPL — wiki­pe­dia model non­profit edu­ca­tion and research com­munit­ies. GFDL for doc­u­ment­a­tion. Plus (cc) licenses.

Encyc­lo­pe­dia » Lib­rary: Wikia, travel guides vs. encyc­lo­pe­dia entries. Open­source know­ledge. Mup­pet­swiki eg: 300 wiki­pe­dia entries; Wiki site 12,000 art­icles about the Muppets.

Itzhak Per­l­man: wiki­pe­dia; fails to men­tion he was on Mup­pets show. Spin/angle. Everything in the world from a Mup­pet per­spect­ive

Mode of pro­duc­tion, new style of cul­tural work. Only way to pub­lish in this way, and this volume

2500 com­munit­ies in 66 lan­guages; Klin­gon is not a lan­guage. LOL

Explo­sion of creative.

Open serving: free soft­ware, free con­tent, people keep ad rev­enue. No clue as to busi­ness model yet; like day of OS soft­ware; skep­ti­cism. Hugh amount that can be done. Soft­ware pack­ages text, images. As cost of band­width drops.

Wiki­pe­dia bill lower in Decem­ber 2006, vs Decem­ber 2005 as band­width cost because less.

Jimmy: Google’s worst night­mare. Jimmy’s mom like Fast Company

Search engines are not demo­cratic, not trans­par­ent. Not a good state of affairs. Pro­to­cols of inter­net are open; view / time; OS com­munity to cre­ate search engine soft­ware to chal­lenge big guys. Search.wikia.com. Com­munity design on the site. Clone basic idea of search engine, get links back. Expect pub­lic launch end of CY2007. Media not at launch of wiki­pe­dia (so start wrong) — so, work in back­ground before launch. Expect low qual­ity whilst soft­ware is in development.

Wiki­pe­dia is global. 1.750m art­icles in Eng­lish, <33% of the total. 128 lan­guages = 1000 art­icles. 5–10 reg­u­lar users. Group has formed genu­ine com­munity. How to reach out to com­munit­ies out­side the wiki­pe­dia group in their language.

Free access to sum of all know­ledge. Stallman/GNU. Free as in Speech. Free­dom to copy, free­dom to modify, free­dom to dis­trib­ute, free do dis­trib­ute non-commercially. Con­trib­ut­ing into the commons.

Sum of all human know­ledge: wiki­pe­dia, encyl­o­pe­dia: not a data dump; sum­mary of human knowledge.

250,000 art­icles in every lan­guage spoken nat­ively by at least 1,000,000 people — goal.  347 lan­guages that fit this descrip­tion. Cur­rently only 6 lan­guages meet this goal.

Reusable, dis­trib­ut­able over the world: (Truth in Num­bers) visit squat­ter city in New Delhi. Illegal set­tle­ment. No schools, infra­struc­ture. (Sangam­vi­har sp?) Par­ents cre­at­ing private schools. Bet­ter edu­ca­tion for this kids (this is uni­ver­sal) — no inter­net access. 400 stu­dents. 2 com­puters. 6^th grade class can touch com­puters. All the stu­dents in uni­form. Unli­censed school, can­not film, Gov’t could shut down! Some­thing broken in a policy that can shut­down schools and not provide replacement.

Wiki­pe­dia sup­plied on CD; no lib­rary; where there are few com­puters and no con­nec­tion. High chal­lenge ahead. 250,000 art­icles to eng­lish speak­ers with access: dif­fer­ent in devel­op­ing countries.

Wiki­pe­dia: only 7 full­time people; wiki­pe­dia 9^th most pop­u­lar web­site (6^th in Ger­many) (ref: Alexa). Like David Has­sel­hof of the inter­net in ger­many. 12^th most pop­u­lar in Iran. Per­sian lan­guage editor turned into police twice. Large blog­ging pop­u­la­tion in Iran. Crazy people call the police, and the police ignore them. Free­dom of speech, wor­ried in Iran. Make a big noise if he is arres­ted oth­er­wise you might just dis­s­ap­pear in Iran.

CNN.com 2.3% of the inter­net. wikipedia.com 6.2%.  Journos call Jimmy and ask “what does the inter­net think?” old skool media

cnn.com is not grow­ing, wiki­pe­dia is grow­ing. people are get­ting their inform­a­tion from dif­fer­ent sources. Press cov­er­age (error in Wiki­pe­dia, who know?) — old­me­dia got wind of it (John Seg­anthaler) in one para. Cor­rec­ted in wiki­pe­dia within 10 minutes. USToday a month later: wiki­pe­dia is a dan­ger­i­ous thing. Almost killed wiki­pe­dia (LOL: boost ratings)

How good is wiki­pe­dia. Only aca­demic look, Dec06. Nature magazine. Sci­entific Journal. cf: Wiki­pe­dia, Brit­an­nica. Peer review from Nature. Look for major/minor errors. 50 art­icles. Avg 3/article in Brit­an­nica. 4/article in Wiki­pe­dia. Not that bad, but doesn’t show improve­ment in qual­ity over time. Pick 10–100, look at his­tory and see the changes over time. Self-correcting beha­vior of the con­tent. Wiki­pe­dia striv­ing to be bet­ter. Its a shock that Brit­an­nica is so bad , and not self correcting.

Per­fec­tion is not pos­sible as an abso­lute; it will take time. It’s a goal.

Good job of Neut­ral­ity, bed­rock prin­ciple. Widely diver­gent view points can col­lab­or­ate. Even present­ing the dis­agree­ment. Thought­ful tol­er­a­tion are import­ant, where we can dis­agree safely. Mono-cultures are dan­ger­ous. Healthy dis­cus­sion, all have same goal. Keep the cent­ral goal in mind. Entire pro­ject is one of love.

How do we foster these styles of com­munit­ies. Prin­ciples of soft­ware design. Thought exer­cise. Ima­gine a res­taur­ant design.  Steak/knives/killers/cages — bad design, bad soci­ety. Soft­ware for social inter­ac­tion, same in edu­ca­tion. Think about the bad things first (then design so they don’t do the bad things)

In real world, don’t assume bad­ness. Design, think about clean­ing up after­wards. Mostly, accept trade off of open soci­ety — believe in good­ness of other people. Assume do bad, top-down approach, bad. Hos­tile mind­set, not trust­ing. Nuture com­munit­ies, not top down. Bring people together, not tech­no­logy. Suc­cess­ful online com­munity same as off­line. Respect for indi­vidu­als, respect for oth­ers, love. Tech con­fer­ences, its about love. Fun­da­mental bene­vol­ence. Strangers are people you haven’t met yet.

How should teach­ers use Wikipedia?

Use wiki­pe­dia as ini­tial source, but not he only source! Just like an encyc­lo­pe­dia. Don’t cite wiki­pe­dia. Go deeper into the inform­a­tion. wiki­pe­dia is edited live.

danah boyd: “encyc­lo­pe­dia cita­tions are rearely my prob­lem, but wiki­pe­dia as cliff­notes is.”

cliff­notes: read the sum­mary rather going to the real sources.

Always fol­low the second sources at the bot­tom of the wiki­pe­dia page.

cf: Battle of Iwo Jima: wiki­pe­dia to get con­text, then movie, then read novel. Con­text, sum­mary. Not as the final source.

teacher: I told the kids not to look at wiki­pe­dia: jimmy: I can tell you not to listen to rock and roll, too.  They are doing it.

All source mater­i­als have flaws; wiki­pe­dia has policy that by no means per­fect, but nor are anywhere.

Free cul­ture: groundswell. CC licens­ing. Jimmy on board of CC. Mil­lions of objects on the inter­net with CC licensing.

Tak­ing the OS soft­ware cul­ture to con­tent. You­tube: get off your butt and add CC licensing !

Go CC licens­ing. yeah. base layer of rich cul­tural mater­i­als. Base exchange of cul­tural experience.

Power of decent­ral­isa­tion. let’s do it. (cc)

Q&A

Charles Sturt Uni­ver­sity: strengths, group import­ant in know­ledge. aca­demic exer­cise: closer to the truth. What is the edit­ing process.

Link: edit this page, wiki-code is a little geeky. Any change you like. its live imme­di­ately. Keep his­tory of art­icle. Truly delete in legal/privacy issue. See the revisions/history and see what’s gone before. One click and it reverts to pre­vi­ous ver­sion. Another thing, His­tory — all past revi­sions and com­pare any two revi­sions. Para­graphs changes, words changed (yellow/red respectively).

Can also see who so can be blocked, many schools (par­lia­ments LOL) get blocked for QA.

Art­icles on watch list for editing.

Can see full his­tory of con­tri­bu­tion for a per­son, can see account­ab­il­ity (rather than gate­keep­ing). Assume good work, once you start doing bad things, we’ll notice. Com­munity self-polices

State Lib­rary Vic­toria: cost of text books, learn­ing to zero

Same reason as for encyc­lo­pe­dia, Brit­an­nica is expens­ive in book form. Brit­an­nica is fur­niture. Expense crafts­man­ship of the books. Gen­eral, cost go to zero (or close to)

Inter­net, pro­jects freely licensed text books. Wiki­books (textbooks).  Wild and wooly wiki

Org called Con­nec­tions from Rice Uni­ver­sity for freely licensed; tra­di­tional author­ship model.

Text­book @ Eco­nomic 101 (US speak) ; 2–3 text books that are pop­u­lar; authors make a hit. Samuel­son text as eg; super­star eco­nom­ist. Hand­ful of authors make a pure liv­ing out of books. New method of pro­duc­tions, 1000 eco­nom­ics pro­fess­ors can cre­ate text. OS release early and often. Profs test­ing in classroom to improve quality.

Free soft­ware dom­in­ate in Unix world (cf; Apache) mode of pro­duc­tion vs. Microsoft spend­ing bil­lions on serv­ers like IIS. Why? Open source model. Fire­fox > 50%, wants to avoid Microsoft as much as pos­sible (edit­or­ial: there goes my chance for a photo with Jimmy)

Gen­eral pub­lic, tax­payer money — avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic. Research res­ults aca­demic journ­als and soft­ware gen­er­ated by Gov’t open source. Trends are strong and inevitable.

(edit­or­ial note: Nick feels like he is going to be shunned and stoned by those around him, as I am wear­ing a Microsoft shirt)

Qual­ity of Know­ledge, vs. Volume of Know­ledge. Most great theo­lo­gians have born and died.

Jimmy 5 years ago a guy in PJs on the inter­net. Ain’t no guru. LOL

Volume of info is great: wiki­pe­dia is about the assist­ance of assist­ing with know­ledge over­load. cf. search for sydney in google vs. go to wikipedia.

PRC China: no wiki­pe­dia access. Banned? Con­nec­tion issue?

Main­land China, all lan­guages of wiki­pe­dia is blocked. (editor: so much for free access)

Jimmy will not cen­sor, and work­ing with cen­sors is mor­ally wrong. Jimmy to go to China at high level as pos­sible to open up.

Pos­i­tion of wiki­pe­dia: block of wiki­pe­dia is an error. Vast major­ity of know­ledge in wiki­pe­dia is not sub­vers­ive. Con­trolling is not assist­ing the IT industry and depriving the Chinese people of a voice.

Using Skype to get around the fire­wall of China

Nor­way: drum­ming com­pet­i­tion, old tra­di­tional 150 years. Big deal loc­ally, known out­side Nor­way. Put art­icle into Nor­way; also trans­lated into Eng­lish. Sim­ilar fest­ival some­where in China, we’ve never heard of — can­not con­trib­ute this out­side. China gov’t thinks they are mis­un­der­stood — makes no sense to block con­tent as wiki­pe­dia is import­ant to get their own voice out to the world.

Engin­eer­ing Com­pany: 5000 people, online com­munity, young people within from older people. Setup own wiki. Chal­lenges, get­ting people to con­trib­ute as its voluntary.

Wiki, low bar­rier to entry as pos­sible, takes time to build. Momentum; pro­cess of learn­ing how to learn the social learn­ing; edit oth­ers work, con­ver­sa­tions productive.

Inside com­pan­ies dif­fer­ent; wiki­pe­dia, new­pe­dia failed prior — but had a com­munity. Human­it­arian excitement.

Internal, fer­vour not as great. Cau­tion: cul­ture, hier­arch­ical and top-down, will have trouble as lower level don’t want to sub­vert this hier­archy. Big boss writes , all bow down on the excel­lent prose — wiki will fail. These organ­isa­tions will fail in the col­lab­or­at­ive world.

What seems to work, someone is an evan­gel­ist for the wiki, and tasked to make it go. Beloved per­son, great social skills not the unfriendly ubergeek.

Cat­egor­ies, tax­onom­ies, some are main­ten­ance func­tion. Can true cat­egor­ies extrac­ted from main­ten­ance categories.

Lot  of talk on folk­sonomy; tax­onomy cre­ated by the people. Tag­ging in an emer­gent tag­ging sys­tem. eg; Flickr tags, from the over­all com­munity — array of things appear. Tag­ging can get a lot of noise. eg: sem­inar series tagged with jimmy­wales not of jimmywales.

Com­munity mon­it­ors the qual­ity, some have hobby dis­cuss and debate the taxonomy.

Jimmy con­sult­ing @ BBC a few years ago, search engine for gen­eral search. Couple of staff mem­bers to hier­archy of con­cepts. They were gobsmacked, or dear, the wiki­pe­dia cat­egor­ies: soc­cer play­ers: Wiki­pe­dia sub­cat­egor­ies by teams, coun­try of ori­gin by the com­munity; vs. BBC do it internally.

Under freeli­cense, some have extrac­ted the tax­onomy for other uses.

Wiki­pe­dia, cat­egory via topic. Use same topic for internal func­tional reasons.

Inside/outside the Wiki for people’s own sites?

Recog­nise: two sep­ar­ate organ­isa­tion: wiki­me­dia, wikipedia.

Wikia: other areas. Wikia sup­port wiki­me­dia as much as pos­sible. Mup­pets is a wikia site. Wiki­pe­dia is neut­ral. nobias. Don’t push an agenda.

Wikia, no rule as to neut­ral­ity. Sus­tain­a­pe­dia (sp), how sus­tain­able world, cer­tainly not neutral.

So, if your site is not neut­ral (advocacy, etc) wikia.

Don’t come into wiki­pe­dia, its an encyc­lo­pe­dia: not a data dump.

Peter Jack­son, ABD RN Online: Top-down edit­or­ial pro­cess driven, how do large orgs chill out (excel­lent idea)

Went to ABC yes­ter­day to talk about this, Jimmy quote: I think the world should relax a notch or two (edit­or­ial agree!)

Con­sult­ing for the BBC, sim­ilar issue as to ABC. BBC:everyone loves the BBC, espe­cially the BBC

Mod­er­a­tion policy: looser policy now, only react when someone com­plains in their mes­sage boards.

Think about: react­ive mod­er­a­tion in forum, more open­ness — but also for the com­munity for self con­trol. Wiki, flame wars are mod­er­ated by the com­munity, and the policy is set before. If there are flames, they are self deleted. Forum soft­ware doesn’t give the com­munity an abil­ity to throw out the troublemakers.

Don’t pick the hard­est pos­sible topic to do a wiki about: some­thing easy, friendly. Suc­cess­ful experience.

Know­ledge how to do a suc­cess­ful wiki, call Jimmy at Wikia. It has noth­ing to do with the soft­ware, its about man­aging the com­munity. Don’t just block the trouble­makers: you must have a tol­er­ance for trolls and be a soft tar­get so they get tired and just go away.

Garry: says Mel­bourne was best show (woo­hoo, chose the right one. Except I missed the Chaser guys)

Press con­fer­ence, mas­ter of answer­ing questions!

A big thankyou to Scot Stein­hardt, Prin­cipal of Mount Gravatt High School. He runs a tight ship, and had a big day yes­ter­day with “big names” arriv­ing from all corners of Aus­tralia to get some of his time.  Thanks, Scot. And live that dream!

To all the teach­ers who atten­ded and answered my ran­dom ques­tions. Thanks.

Also, thanks to Sean Tier­ney for host­ing me — and provid­ing some excel­lent guid­ance from a professional’s per­spect­ive. Notes from my day are pos­ted here, for com­ments.

Year 10 (and the Year 11s who sub­vers­ively arrived, too) at Mount Gravatt: remem­ber Astro­nauts and Prin­cesses. You guys have the oppor­tun­ity to do any­thing you want. First thing, is ensure that the Wiki­pe­dia entries for your school, and your local area are up to date and informative.

Later that night, Dif­fer­ence of Opin­ion on the ABC covered this whole area of the digital gen­er­a­tion gap.

And even later, Chris Saad, Cody Robb and I had a long dis­cus­sion on the debate. Mount Gravatt came up in the pod­cast. The world is small when its highly connected.

1. Web 2.0: needs extra work to map to teach­ing out­comes (del.icio.us, flickr) Many Web 2.0 sites still blocked by policy. It makes it dif­fi­cult to use all the cool web 2.0 stuff in school, espe­cially when these tools will be used by the stu­dents for pro­ject deliv­ery. Think a mashup as a pro­ject handin. (cool!)
2. If multiple-media sub­mis­sion types (Power­point, video, web sites) are required for present­a­tion: how do we present? Mak­ing the tech­no­logy easier is key; and the stu­dents have more advanced Quick­time, Flash­Player, WMV, Power­point than on the stand­ard, locked down desktops. Secondly, as SVGA style con­nec­tions to pro­ject­ors in the room.
3. Web job oppor­tun­it­ies mapped to ICT. What sort of jobs exist for stu­dents in a web-world? Art teach­ers > design, for instance
4. 90+% of Yr10s have IM address; 80+% com­mu­nic­ate with people out­side Aus­tralia! Can only think this is based either on fam­ily or friends over­seas with sim­ilar interests
5. Man­aging the bal­ance between ICT evan­gel­ism vs. Microsoft demo-stuff.  Show­ing cool stuff is cool. Con­sider that video cabling and audio may not suit in all circumstances.
6. Key guid­ance from Sean Tier­ney crit­ical. 20 minute chunking import­ant; just like adult learning.
7. Sur­prised many teach­ers how few people it took at Cas­tle­maine XXXX to make beer, how auto­mated the pro­cess is. Can a bunch of teach­ers organ­ise a p*ss-up in a brew­ery? (yes, if timetable permits)
8. Mount Gravatt High: Im in ur your Wiki­pe­dia pages.