EduGlu Sandbox

I figured it was high time to finish my reading of Ernst Jünger’s The Glass Bees (which was cut short in the original attempt

I’ve heard about Citizendium a few times in the last few days. Today was, however, the first time that I went to it. It’s founded by Larry Sanger - one of the founders of Wikipedia.

The aims of the site are:

In a comment to my recent ill-considered ramblings on OpenCourseWare, Leigh Blackall advocated 'truly OPEN source and not just "free"' approaches to open education. Point taken -- if there is one additional point I wish I had made in that original post, it is that open education takes many forms... I, for one, think that John Willinsky's wiki combining authentic teacher training and a database of useful lesson plans is every bit as much a contribution to open education as a collection of PDF'ed lecture notes assembled as a course.

One of the sites Leigh cited as a natural platform for open educators is WikiEducator, which is a very impressive project with lots on the go.

One, via Stephen Downes, I learn that WikiEducator is piloting a collaborative video project that may eventually benefit Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-powered environments. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I have never heard of Kaltura, especially since they have gathered some buzz previously...

Two, WikiEducator will be leading a very cool ongoing web seminar as part of the Learning4Content project which looks like a great opportunity to hone MediaWiki authoring skills and also to get a sense of a novel pedagogical model. Gotta love the Learner Contract: in return for your training, you deliver an open educational resource. I'm signing up.

Finally, WikiEducator will be hosting the ongoing development of the OER Handbook. (Here's the blog.)

Henry Jenkins ELI Keynote address is podcasted here.

Jenkins opened with the sensible observation that contrary to media reports, Middlebury College’s much ballyhooed “banning” of Wikipedia was in fact a reasonable first step toward generating a dialogue, and an opportunity to open up the research process, one that can be conducted grounded in reason, not fear.

His subsequent talk proceeded fairly logically from there, and rather than me attempting a comprehensive summary, I’d say your time is better spent reading Jenkin’s own notes on a similar talk given six months ago or Bryan Alexander’s initial response — which he somehow published before the end of the session!

But again, a couple of my own quick takeaways:

• Jenkins made the rather obvious point that new literacies require the old literacies, that we are expanding literacy not displacing it. Obvious, sure, but do I remember to offer that caution when I argue with people about Wikipedia?

• In a succesion of action verbs describing how we deal with the flood of information in new media environments, I thought the best one was “negotiate.” Expect me to run that word into the ground.

• At one point Jenkins bemoaned how “most of us don’t know how to live in a collective intelligence.” To which I thought, most people don’t know how to live, period. That isn’t meant to be a flip as it sounds. We struggle to manage our friendships, our family relationships, our diets, our time, our finances, our engagement with civic institutions… why the hell would our ability to negotiate (HA!) inside complex and shifting cognitive constructs be any different?

My favorite part of the talk was his assertion that Wikipedia represents a challenge to the academic community to reclaim our role as public intellectuals. Bryan twitted the proposition: “What if each American academic spent 5 minutes in 2008 editing Wikipedia?” (My quick reply is that a significant proportion would get hooked, and end up spending a lot more than five minutes.)

Along those lines, I want to point to a very cool Wikipedia project that is part of a class taught by my UBC colleague Jon Beasley-Murray, “with the collective goals …to bring a selection of articles to “Feature Article” status (or as near as possible) by April 10.” Some of the topics are well-known, others don’t have entries at all.

Let’s break this exercise down a bit:

• Students will need to demonstrate all the traditional literacy skills (researching accurate materials, writing lucidly, determining and adopting the appropriate tone, etc…)

• Students will gain new media literacy skills, as they negotiate (HA HA) wording with other users (and anyone who has seriously engaged in a Wikipedia authoring process knows this requires some sophisticated social and diplomatic skills), and also work to make the articles notable enough to others to gain the desired “featured article” status. Students will thus gain an intimate knowledge and understanding of how Wikipedia really works.

• Rather than simply writing a paper that gets graded by a professor or TA and then returned, the outcome is publicly accessible. The activity is authentic, not simulated, and the product is a wildly popular open resource.

• The technology cost to the institution, and the required input from technology support staff at the institution - $0

The wild part is, Jon comes up with a cool idea like this pretty much every semester. Can’t wait to see what he thinks of next…

Technorati tags: ELIAnnual08, span312, literacy

As we discussed, we are modifying the focus of this course based on your needs. Rather than approach it from a pedagogical approach, we will be looking more deeply at the technical aspects of the development and management of web-based services. There are no required readings for this course however there are two books that I would highly recommend for your bookshelf. The first is Will Richardson’s “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.” This is a great read on the pedagogical implementation of web technologies in the classroom. The other is Elisabeth and Eric Freeman’s “Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML” which I’ve found to be a wonderfully practical introduction to programming in HTML and is a great reference for those who need to know more about the inner workings of the code.

So for us, the first step is to find a home. As our explorations will require us to have deeper access to the dark and dirty recesses of the web, we will need to have two things to start:

• A domain name and
• A hosting service

First of all you will need an identity, a web address where folks can find you. This may be perhaps the most challenging of tasks as you will likely find that many of the names that you would hope to use are already taken, whether they are in active use or are simply being “squatted” on my domain name speculators. In the past I have used a number of different domain name registrar services but have recently used GoDaddy.com with great success. You can shop around and find domains available at a number of pricing levels but it seems that if you are paying more than $10 annually, you’re paying too much.

The first thing that you will likely notice is the wide range of choices in TLDs or Top Level Domains. If you follow the last link to the Wikipedia entry and click show next to the box entitled Generic top-level domains, you will see a list of common TLDs such as .com, .net, .org, etc. When you search on GoDaddy, you can select from a wide range of TLDs in the drop down but the results page is much more useful as it displays not only the TLD you selected, but the availability of other TLDs as well. For example, searching on my domain, whitemountaintech, shows that both the .com and .net are not available but that the .us, .info, .org are.

Take care in selecting your domain name, particularly if this site is going to have a life beyond this course. You want to ensure that it is memorable to your prospective audience.

Don’t buy the domain name yet though. Check out your hosting options next as you will need to know the IP addresses in order to point your new domain name to your hosting service. There are a number of hosting services out there. Some domain name registrars such as GoDaddy provide the option to have your site hosted by them. But as with any big purchase, make sure that you shop around. While many hosts offer the same basic array of services such as email, web space, etc. There are add-on features such as CPanel, Fantastico, email lists, streaming media services, etc. that you will want to investigate. The bottom line is that although it is possible to move your domain from one host to another, it is not without a level of complexity that makes it a rather unpleasant process for even the most hard-core of system administrators!

When I first launched my sites, I used a service called Hasweb.com primarily because it had the features I was looking for at a price that was just right for me - US$48 per year. Now this only let me host one domain name but that was ok because I wanted to use this as a springboard to learn the nuances of site management. I now use Dreamhost and a number of my fellow edutechies use Bluehost. Both of these run a bit more, closer to US$100-120 annually, although they also provide the ability to host multiple domains and have commensurately higher storage and bandwidth allowances.

So here is your homework.

1. Select and purchase a domain name.
2. Select and subscribe to a hosting service.
3. Connect your domain name to your hosting service.
4. Using the information provided by your host, explore the features available to you and learn more about what each does.
5. Once you’ve done this, please respond via comment to this post.

[tags]ce5560, ce5560-summer2007, course, grad-course[/tags]

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