Wikipedia as it happens

Ever wondered how often Wikipedia is updated? You're not the first because there's now a site that shows you updates as they happen and where in the world the update has been made.
Wikipediavision is the brainchild of a guy called László Kozma from the Helsinki University of Technology. It is a mashup with a world map (Google maps) and a feed from Wikipedia and you can simply sit and watch the world add to Wikipedia. When a new entry appears you just click on it and you see it on Wikipedia. Something for those long winter evenings maybe.

Academic burnout

The academic world is subject to the same trends as society in general and one of these is bewildering choice in everything. In the "good old days" there was, for example, a limited number of publications within a given field and if you kept an eye on them you could keep abreast of the latest findings. Today there are countless sources of information in every conceivable field and keeping up to date is a much greater challenge.

This is the theme of an article, Knowledge overload, by Ken Coates in Inside Higher Ed. He gives the example of a recent conference which featured around 4,000 presentations over 4 days and concludes that even the most enthusiastic delegate can only manage to sample around 2% of the content on offer. Many of the papers were presented to very limited audiences, even if the content may well have been highly relevant. Even if all the material was accessible on the net afterwards, how many of the participants have any time to seriously read it all? I have just received the proceedings of a conference I attended last year and even though I'm sure there is plenty of valuable content there I doubt if I'll ever read more than a small fraction of it.

More and more people are writing more and more articles in an ever increasing number of publications, both on-line and on paper but how many are actually being read? The author, like the rest of us, finds it impossible now to stay up to date in his field and resorts more often than not to reading abstracts rather than papers, digests rather than articles and so on.

This infinite diversity and variety ("an academic monsoon" as Coates puts it) means that skills like digital literacy, skimming and filtering are essential but as the academic overload swells the risk increases that some research may never be read by anyone. Should there be limits to the amount of academic output to ensure that it is actually put to constructive use?

Is the net changing the way we read?

There has been considerable debate around an article by Nicholas Carr called "Is Google making us stupid?" He admits to finding it increasingly difficult to engage in deep reading and blames it on our restless habits on the net (symbolised by Google); "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

We are becoming increasingly impatient as the information overload increases. Quick news summaries, newsletters, highlights packages and Twitter feeds help us keep up with events without spending too much time on it all. Blog posts of over 5 paragraphs are seldom read. Carr fears we're losing the ability to contemplate and reflect since we never switch off the background noise for long enough to hear the silence again.

Trent Baston's response in Campus Technology sees the trend in a more positive light. Knowledge today is constantly being adapted and enriched in a constant dialogue. Learning is no longer a solitary activity reading the thoughts of one author but is revised almost daily in a rich on-line discussion. In a way, Baston argues, our net habits are more in line with oral tradition; listening to different arguments and replying spontaneously. Rather than making us stupid, the net is helping us discover new ways to collaborate and learn.

Plug and play

A guy in Finland is shooting to world fame as a result of an unusual operation. Having lost a finger in a motorbike accident he has replaced it with a prosthetic finger containing a 2GB USB memory stick. He just sticks his finger into the computer and downloads. News sites everywhere are covering this of course, including the British Daily Telegraph. If only we could then upload the contents of the memory stick into the brain ...

Skimming and zapping

In the age of homo zapiens it is not surprising to read that people tend not to read long texts any more. Just as we zap frenetically from channel to channel trying to find something worth watching, we also tend to click away from texts on the net that are too demanding. It's hard to catch a reader's attention on the net and even if you do you can bet that few will spend long reading your content.

This issue is discussed in a new post on Tony Karrer's blog eLearning Technology. Maybe we need to teach the skill of effective skimming to students in order to get the gist of an article and maybe, more importantly, we need to teach the skill of writing articles that are adapted for skim-readers. Even if you've written a brilliant study full of detailed argument it's important to highlight the essentials to catch the attention of those who are only willing to give your report a few short minutes of their time (see even an earlier post on his blog).

Are we becoming lazy readers/viewers forever zapping away from anything demanding or discomforting? Or are we simply finding new ways of coping with the information overload?

You've seen the wiki now read the book!

I'm not sure what to make of the interesting service offered by PediaPress. You choose a selection of entries from Wikipedia and PediaPress will make a book out of them and send it to you. The cost of this hard copy starts at $8.99 depending, of course, on how much of Wikipedia you want to print (take a look at a sample book). So theoretically you can aim to have a "fine set of modern encyclopedias on your bookshelf" as the door-to-door salesmen of yesteryear used to say.

It certainly enables you to compile your own book on whatever obscure topic you like and be the owner of a one-off publication. I doubt if there's a mass market here but in these days of customisation in everything, why not customise books?

Real writing

When I was at school we were taught "real writing" and spent years painstakingly practicing the art. In those days that was excellent preparation for a future where handwriting still mattered. Later on in school, the girls got the chance to learn touch typing as a preparation for secretarial work whereas boys concentrated on things like woodwork (or in my case Latin!).

TonyKarrer's blog eLearning Technology has a new post (Cursive writing - outraged?) wondering why children today still learn cursive writing despite the fact that few will need it later whilst almost no-one learns touch typing, a key skill for the future. I can't help admiring the keyboard skills of women who learnt touch typing in their youth as they effortlessly type reports without even looking at the keyboard. The rest of us, however, battle away with two fingers.

Even if the younger generation can type text messages at the speed of light their keyboard skills can't compete with their mothers or grandmothers. Surely it's time to bring back some basic keyboard skills to schools, possibly at the expense of some of the handwriting classes.

Books in the iPod

In the previous entry I dreamed of a link-up between the Kindle and the iPod/iPhone and as if my magic came an article in the New York Times announcing a deal between Amazon and Apple making their e-books available to iPods. Still far from an open solution but at least a little bit of compatibility. However, I don't think I'll be reading War and Peace on my iPod any time soon.

E-books get serious

E-books have been around for a long time but few people have found the idea very appealing. I can read a few pages of a report on a screen but then it becomes a strain on the eyes. We're all waiting for an e-book reader that is light, easy-to-use and has an eye-friendly screen.

Amazon's new Kindle e-book reader could be the answer according to reviewers. It's lighter than most paperbacks, can contain a couple of hundred books, newspaper or blogs and you download your content via a wireless link. Very similar to the iPod for music. The catch is that just as Apple virtually cornered the market for legally downloaded music so may Amazon for printed material.

In an article in Slate magazine, Fear the Kindle, Farhad Manjoo argues that Kindle gives Amazon a virtual monopoly on the e-book market since you can only buy content for your Kindle from Amazon. I love the idea and would love to try it out but I only wish that we could somehow move away from all these proprietary solutions and have devices that are compatible with all suppliers. Imagine a cross between the Kindle and the iPod that could hold books, news, music, photos, films and games and could access the combined resources of all suppliers. I'm sure the technology exists but the business model is the problem.

Time for change?

Obama's promises of change has spawned lots of ideas in every line of business and education is no exception. For example, Marc Prensky has written an open letter to Barack Obama where he argues that it is time for radical changes in the way we approach education in order to equip students with the skills necessary for the 21st century. Much the same letter could be sent to just about every world leader actually.

In a similar vein, the Hoover Institution's journal Education Next contains a discussion article by John E. Chubb, Terry M. Moe and Larry Cuban entitled Forum - Virtual schools Will education technology change the role of the teacher and the nature of learning? In general they seem optimistic that we can see major changes in education in the near future but not without a struggle.

New technology is basically disruptive to existing structures, and generally provokes strong resistance. As a result we should expect evolution rather than revolution. Often technical innovation comes from external sources (industry pressure, government initiatives etc) and teachers are not involved in the process apart from the implementation. That often leads to resistance and the innovation process fizzles out.

"Their (public educators') approach to information technology is rooted in the status quo: it is about making the existing system work better without really changing it. In the new social reality, however, this isn’t going to cut it. There will be competition. There will be pressure. There will be change."

Although almost everyone in higher education has access to the net it has still had little effect on teaching methods. It is not just a matter of implementing new technology into the existing system, the whole system needs an overhaul. Fundamental principles such as the age-graded school need to be re-examined, according to the article.

More and more students will study to some extent outside the traditional classroom model and it will eventually become the norm despite hard resistance. The core learning processes will be on the net and although there will always be a need for face-to-face interaction the traditional school model will be much more fluid.

Better conferences

Last week (18-20 Feb) I took part in an online conference, Spaces of interaction - an online conversation on improving traditional conferences, the theme of which was how to make academic conferences more inclusive and interactive. The traditional conference format is hard to change despite all the social tools we have at our disposal today and even conferences that examine the forefront of net-based learning tend to consist of the time-honoured format of lectures, panel discussions and keynotes.

This conference lasted 3 days and consisted of a social network site (based on Ning) for discussion and networking as well as synchronous presentation sessions using Adobe Connect. The presentations I saw were well attended with around 80 participants. As ever there was plenty of discussion in the chat session which can be a bit of a distraction for those of us with limited multi-tasking skills. All the presentations were recorded and can be accessed by anyone (watch all the recorded sessions) and the advantage of watching the recordings is that you have a better chance of assimilating both the presenter's arguments and the sometimes intensive back channel debate in the chat session.

It's impossible to summarize such a conference since I've only really taken part in fragments. A further problem is finding time to check out some more of the sessions in between "regular" work and routines. The problem with online conferences is that it's difficult to concentrate on them for more than an hour or two and they tend to get drowned out by the noise of work. If you're actually at an event you have a certain licence to disconnect with normal routines and can concentrate on the conference.

Some of the themes I did pick up were:

• Social tools can be effectively used as pre- and post-conference activities; encouraging delegates to introduce themselves and their interests, link up, start discussion threads, follow up conference themes etc.
• Facilitate more networking and exchange of knowledge by using a variety of communication channels
  
• How useful is back-channel communication? Chat sessions and Twitter are used increasingly to enable delegates to discuss during lecture sessions. Distractor or facilitator?
• Let presenters record short video previews to post on the conference website to help delegates choose what to attend.
• Can you charge fees for participating in online conferences?
• Not all activities need to be interactive, there's still a place for a really stimulating presentation
• Allow for more open and unplanned spaces in conferences where discussions can take place. Too easy to fill every hour with planned activities.

The question is, as ever, how to find the right balance. Too many bells and whistles may annoy many delegates just as others find the traditional format stifling. I also suspect that many of us quite like the traditional format as a way of stepping back from work for a couple of days and just going with the flow. We do like traditions and routines and don't like being shaken up too much. However, there's plenty scope for new ideas and I hope this initiative sparks further discussion among conference organisers.

For another person's view of the conference see Carole Turner's entry on the conference Ning.

Textbook revolution

There is a vast amount of free learning resources available on the net today; video podcasts on iTunes U, whole courses from MIT Open CourseWare, books at Wikibooks and photos, films and diagrams at Wikimedia Commons. All sites encourage sharing and collaboration in order to make good educational material available to all. I've now discovered a wikisite called Textbook revolution which is run by students and aims at at offering free course literature as e-books. No copyright issues either as authors freely make their material available under Creative Commons or as public domain.

I wonder if there are any studies being done about how all this is actually being used on courses. Is it used as supplementary material, as recommended study material or does anyone put together whole course modules full of on-line material? Most people take pride in producing their own material and have an in-built unease about borrowing from others. In addition, there are many who are uneasy about e-books and the problem of reading long texts on a screen. I don't see so many colleagues who make use of all these free resources but awareness is definitely growing. It would be interesting to see if there are any patterns on who is using most e-resources, which subject areas, types of institution, country etc.

At last - cellphone compatibility (maybe)

How many cellphone battery chargers do you have lying in drawers at home? Every time you buy a new model you need a new charger because no two models seem to use the same type of charger. You would think that since the manufacturers are able to invent such incredibly smart devices they could manage to develop a universal battery charger.

However there is hope. An article in The Guardian claims that mobile manufacturers have actually agreed to implementing a universal battery charger enabling us to use the same lead even if we change model. This is part of a wave of "green" measures announced at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona. Other new features will include devices with solar panels and devices made from recycled material.

Laptops in the classroom

Laptops are now commonplace in lectures but what are they used for? As a lecturer it's of course tempting to believe that everyone is making copious notes about your fascinating lecture. However, just sit at the back of the hall and you'll see what really goes on. Many check their e-mail, some check the latest news, Facebook, iTunes and so on. Multi-tasking? Boredom? This isn't just student behaviour, we seniors do the same when given the chance.

Tony Bates writes about this in a new blog entry Laptops in lectures
"If most students have laptops, why are they still having physically to come to a lecture hall? Why can’t they get a podcast of the lecture? Second, if they are coming, why are the lecturers not requiring them to use their laptops for study?"

An article on the site On Campus, Can I have your half attention please?, claims that we are developing a culture of "constant partial distraction" with students easily distracted from the subject being taught. One teacher had managed to get students to accept a ban on laptops in the classroom and this had led to better results but such tactics were unlikely to become widespread.

If we have the technology in place let's either make use of it in a constructive way or decide together that we make some sessions "unplugged" (as MTV used to do with rock groups). Seminars where students are expected to discuss and debate should probably be unplugged to ensure full concentration whereas other sessions could involve groups searching for information or using the net for on-line discussion.

A new internet?

Is it time to reinvent the net? With increasing concerns about security threats and criminal activity on the present internet set-up, people are suggesting starting up a new internet. According to an article in The New York Times (Do we need a new internet?) there are many who advocate a new, more secure internet though the price we pay for the increased security will be reduced anonymity. The idea is to create a kind of "gated community" where your anonymity and certain freedoms are traded for safety from fraudsters and viruses. Evidently the criminal activity on the net today is a major threat to the security of governments, companies and individuals and a major security attack is a question of "when" not "if".

Of course many of us share the vision of the net as a democratic force allowing us to share knowledge, experience and ideas but sadly the openness and creative freedom of the net is being exploited by criminal elements. According to the article we may be left with choosing between the safe but monitored net and the open and free net where you wander at your own risk.