I’ve been thinking this school year may be the perfect time to introduce students to interactive ways to communicate knowledge to real audiences. The landscape is bursting with new communication possibilities!
“In a sense we owe that to them,” said David F. Warlick, consultant and author and director of the Landmark Project. “Most everything available to adult business world for producing compelling messages is available to students in the classroom. We should trust students to create products that real people use for real purposes.”
Warlick and I discussed several new strategies for learning using new technologies including podcasting, which was, by the way, the hottest topic at the National Educational Computing Conference in Philadelphia this past June.
Podcasts allows students and teachers to publish audio to the Web, usually by uploading files as MP3s. A kind of merger of blogging and radio, the result is an internet “radio show” where teachers and students can create and share educational content. Listeners access the files through a regular Web browser or through their iPods.. Your students’ voices could be heard by their grandparents in Florida and by classes and teachers around the world.
Warlick sees podcasting as a way “turn a classroom inside out. Teachers could use it to inform parents about what kids are learning and how they are learning.” Warlick described the groundbreaking work of Bob Sprankle whose combined 3rd and 4th grade class in Wells, Maine produces Room 208 (http://bobsprankle.com/blog/). The podcast is an exciting example of a classroom engaged in and reflecting on their learning. As they go through the course of the school day, a student might encounter an idea he or she is interested in reporting as a podcast. Sprankle assigns a couple of students to write, refine and rehearse the idea as a script and the students record the segment at end of week. Room 208’s Student Updates involve groups of four students in writing a segment about learning over the course of the week. Students meet each morning for project planning discussions. As producer, Sprankle splices the student segments together and creates a program. Recent podcasts include literature circle discussions, a dress rehearsal for a class show, and a “sound seeing” tour of the junior high Sprankle’s students will be attending this school year.
In his own podcast interview with Warlick, Sprankle noted the activity that the work has made his classroom a better team. Students are proud that they are using cutting edge technologies. Sprankle notes that the podcasts allow his students to publish to a global community and that motivates them as writers. One a weekly basis, they create successful and purposeful pieces of writing. Sprankile sees his students as “sculptors” of the show and of their learning day. “They ask themselves questions. ‘Is this a podcasting moment? Do I want to share it? Is it meaningful?” As an added benefit, Sprankle says the activity facilitates assessment and review. “I can clearly identify areas that need reteaching or individual attention.”
How can you engage your own class in podcasting? Consider presenting student writing through a class radio drama or a poetry slam. Broadcast group discussions or musical recitals. Produce historical reenactments, for instance, “you are there” at the Battle of Gettysburg or the discovery of electricity. Podcast announcements to parents or a class trip. Enhance the school newspaper. Podcast tutorials for challenging concepts that require frequent review. For more ideas Warlick’s Education Podcast Network (http://epnweb.org/) presents examples of projects grade levels and content areas.
On a basic level, podcasts don’t require any sophisticated equipment. Warlick explained that you could produce a podcast with your laptop and its internal microphone, but it might be better to buy a good one. Warlick recommends downloading Audacity, a free, cross-platform sound editor, which will allow you to easily mix music and vocals together. Export your audio file as an MP3 and upload onto your website. Warlick, who enjoys incorporating music and sound effects into his programs in more sophisticated ways, uses Apple’s Garage Band, free for schools that have Mac OSX. Over iTunes 4.9, content can be easily distributed over the iTunes network.
Podcasts are generally published as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) audio feeds. You can also choose to subscribe to podcasts and have the new shows you select downloaded automatically through RSS software, commonly used for delivering text newsfeeds. Once you select the feeds you’d like to subscribe to, an RSS aggregator downloads the feeds on a regular basis. Shows may be easily accessed using a Web browser or, using iPodder software, the listener can download or subscribe to podcasts onto their MP3 players. Subscriptions via Apple’s iTunes are a one-click experience.
Adults know that they learn when they have to accomplish real goals. Warlick notes that students in the classroom often work to accomplish artificial goals, “to give the teacher what he is looking for rather than communicating. We need to teach student how to combine media into information products for real audiences and we need to give them the communication tools they need for that goal. Students need to understand how to use media to communicate in the 21st century.“
Next posts: Blogs and wikis as student projects
Podcast resources
Adapted from my Philadelphia Inquirer techlife@school column.
For more student project web resources visit: http://joycevalenza.com/podblogwiki.html
The Wiki Prayer
May I be granted …
… the serenity to accept the pages I should not edit,
… the courage to edit the pages I should,
… and the wisdom to know the difference.
Lately I’ve been wondering about wikis and their place in student research and their potential as vehicles for student writing.
Wiki refers to the online collaboration model that allows a community of users to freely create, add, and edit website content using their browsers. The term derives from the Hawaiian term wiki wiki, meaning “quick” or “super-fast” and several Web sources note that Wiki is also an acronym for “What I know is”.
Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org has existed as a free community-based, online encyclopedia since 2001. Wikipedia is not only the most popular wiki around, it is also the fastest growing encyclopedia on the Web, adding articles at a rate of around 3,000 a day. And Wikipedia content is becoming even more available to a worldwide audience showing up on the result lists of several major search engines. (Other major project include Wiktionary, an open-content dictionary, and Wikibooks, an open-content textbook and manual project.)
But Wikipedia is NOT a traditional encyclopedia. No well-known reliable publisher solicits experts to write its articles. Maintained in true open source spirit, Wikipedia is developed, written, and corrected by volunteer editors from around the world—editors who range in their experience from casual visitors, to hobbyists, to scholars. For many of these folks, contribution is a way of life. Many generously spend hours each day creating content and correcting commas. But no supervising editorial expert organizes or vets the content of this reference work. Pages change rapidly as volunteer editors negotiate, and sometimes argue the content and its accuracy. Hence, the accuracy of articles is dependent upon the knowledge and conscientiousness of the particular community of authors who notice (or fail to notice) and correct mistaken entries and at what point in the process you choose to view an entry. While anyone can contribute to Wikipedia, the project sets rules for etiquette and dispute resolution, avoiding bias, and respecting copyright.
I love the collaborative nature of this and other wiki projects. I love that the project is multi-lingual. I find the chaos and argument behind the editing scenes fascinating. I admire the new ways in which wikis allow communities, businesses, organizations of all sorts to refine and share information resources. But, my students who choose to use Wikipedia’s free content, have many choices. They have online access to excellent databases and traditional subscription encyclopedias–Grolier, Americana, and World Book—brands we’ve long relied upon for reliability and authority. Should those brands be overlooked? Where does Wikipedia fit in the student research toolkit?
Wikipedia creates some interesting challenges for students and teachers. Its founder and director Jimmy Wales sees his project as “an excellent teaching opportunity.” Wales believes the site is an extraordinary resource for student use “as long as they are educated in critical thinking to understand what an encyclopedia is or is not. In general, Wales feels, “students should only use encyclopedias like Britannica or Wikipedia as a starting point for research — to gain background knowledge — but should turn to more direct sources after that.”
I questioned Wales about the quality of Wikipedia’s content. “I think that the average quality of entries in Wikipedia is equivalent in many areas to the average quality of entries in Britannica,” said Wales, “but because we are young and because of our open editing process, any given entry might be incomplete or inaccurate at any point in time. Critical analysis is a must!” Wales suggests that students examine an article’s edit history. “It’s a radical kind of transparency you don’t find in other resources, you can see the discussions.”
That’s a bit of a problem. Can students really get enough information from an edit history to determine the level of contribution for each of the collaborators? A large number of contributors prefer to remain anonymous, listed only by IP address, a casual screen name, or links to irrelevant personal information. Evaluating an entry’s edit history is a challenge for most adults. It seems a darn-need impossible task for the average ninth grader.
“Should a person who is doing research have to look a long edit list to determine reliability,” asks Tom Paneles, Director of Corporate Communications at Britannica, who expressed serious concerns regarding the value of the open source model in online reference. “Application software is different from knowledge and information. If an application doesn‘t work you must look for the source of the bad code. Information, on the other hand, can be wrong and it may sit in an article forever. Having a lot of people who don’t know what they are doing edit an encyclopedia is not all that helpful. And is a reference work that simply spreads without limits necessarily good?”
But Wales, counters, “encyclopedia articles are essentially a blend of collected knowledge and that is an area in which Wikipedia shines.” Wales, who also proudly points to the project’s multilingual capacity and its extensive network of hyperlinks. He notes the copyright-friendliness of the project. Teachers are free to take articles from Wikipedia and adapt or modify them to meet the needs of their classroom environment. “Everything that we do is placed under a free license,” said Wales.” And most importantly Wales noted, “people find Wikipedia useful. In fact, in some areas, the only encyclopedia material that exists is in Wikipedia.”
Wikipedia is timely. I look to Wikipedia for internet- and technology-related
articles, material relating to popular culture and current events. For some topics it is indeed the only place where information is seriously being gathered. For more stable areas of knowledge, I generally follow my Wikipedia searches with surveys of reference, journal, and newspaper databases.
Wikipedia does a fine job describing the programming language I studied in a graduate course last semester, an area about which my subscription encyclopedias were utterly unaware. And though I wouldn’t necessarily cite them in my research, I have examined the particularly up-to-date article on Marburg virus, with its handy links to WHO data, the especially comprehensive coverage of the July 7 London bombings, complete with multiple graphics, profiles of the bombers, and a wealth of relevant links. Wikipedia also offers comprehensive information for anyone researching the Twinkie or the phenomena of McMansions. On the other hand, though the article on Shakespeare appears to be lengthy and impressive, its contributors and its sources are not the Shakespearean scholars our teachers expect our students to read. The Wikipedia article is frequently edited by, among many unidentified others, the Singing Badger who humbly describes himself as “wise and all knowing” and is known for his karaoke rendition of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Grolier Online’s Americana article on Shakespeare is signed by Hallett Smith, a noted scholar of Elizabethan studies, the author and editor of several books on Shakespeare, and it includes a long list of similarly traditional sources. World Book Online’s article on Shakespeare, is not only authoritative, signed by Frank W. Wadsworth, Professor Emeritus, State University of New York, Purchase, it is also rich in engaging media, impressively organized, and written appropriately for its younger audience.
Bottom line? In my own, perhaps slightly stodgy wiki prayer, regular and substantial Wikipedia contributors would be listed in edit histories with their real names and credentials, and perhaps a note regarding their potential for bias in an area. That is not likely to happen and it is a fact that Wikipedia is an incredibly popular free source of Web reference. Even Jimmy Wales would recommend that though Wikipedia may be a good starting point for many projects, it should never be the only source for student projects.
That said, Wikipedia brings into the classroom wonderful opportunities for discussions among teachers and librarians and students. Information formats are evolving. In the face of information glut, we are faced with new decisions about the very nature of knowledge and authority. When does it make sense to use Wikipedia, other wiki projects, and blogs as information sources? When might it be best to use other sources? What do your teachers expect in terms of authority in a bibliography? How do the edit histories reflect the quality of the articles?
Student wikis?
But what of using the wiki model for student projects? Wikis are perhaps best used as a tool for writing, especially when the project involves collaborative authoring. Their major advantage over the paper notebook, or even the blog, is that they prepare students to write collaboratively in an authentic networked environment. No one student hogs the disk for the master draft. Everyone gets to contribute and edit. Teachers can easily pop in to comment or to monitor progress and see the various contributions. They allow students to present their work in an authentic way, a way increasingly used by business and academia.
Wikis can be used to draft a collaborative document—a simulated peace treaty or proposed legislation. Students might create an improved and hyperlinked chapter for an American history textbook, or they might use a wiki to compile vocabulary words into a wikidictionary, or compile general classroom knowledge into a wikitextbook. They are good vehicles for classes engaged in peer reviewed projects, and function as archived portfolios for classes serious about the writing process.
Wikis need not be limited to the enrollment of the class. They can be collaboratively built by classes across the country or the world. Or they can be cross-age collaborations across a school district.
Beyond student projects, in schools wikis can support meeting or inservice planning, with professionals contributing agenda items and linked resources prior to an event, as notetaking devices during a meeting, and as continuous planning tools following a meeting.
There are some downsides to wiki use. They are by nature a bit chaotic and are vulnerable to hacking. They might inspire editing quarrels as groups negotiate content. But most wiki users note that the group itself works to effectively keep the content stable.
Democracy is lovely. So is scholarship. Wikis are wonderful tools. They have their place in student research and so do quality online reference products. Students need to know how and when to use and create both. We also need to fund and guide students to, high quality online reference sources which offer easy-to-discern authority and we need to make them as easy to get to as a wiki! And we need to open new discussions with students and teachers about the nature and authority of knowledge–to help students judge when to wiki and when not to wiki.
Wikis in Education—Resources
Projects:
Wikipedia http://wikipedia.org
Wiktionary http://en.wiktionary.org/
Wikibooks (open-content textbook and manual project) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wiki Software:
Seed Wiki http://www.seedwiki.com/
List of Wiki Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wiki_software
About Wikis in Education:
Blogs and Wikis as WebQuest Tasks (Dodge) http://webquest.sdsu.edu/necc2004/blogs-and-wikis.htm
Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not (Brian Lamb) http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0452.asp
What’s a Wiki? Tap Into the Quickest, Easiest Way to Publish on the Web (Brian Lamb) http://www.e-strategy.ubc.ca/news/update0401/040121-wiki.html
My Brilliant Failure: Wikis in the Classroom (A constructivist teacher’s cautionary tale) http://kairosnews.org/node/3794
