Wikipedia - LongNow interview with Jimmy Wales
Posted by karen on July 15, 2008 in Uncategorized
Jimmy Wales was recently a guest at the Long Now forum with Stewart Brand. The podcast was very thought-provoking. (Summary here; MP3 here.) Here are some random notes and reflections.
Asked to speak about “vision,” Wales began by saying he is “more of a carpenter than an architect.”
The vision of Wikipedia is to “imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”
[Even though I’ve heard/read this hundreds of times, I still paused and reflected on what a wondrous statement that is.]
Wikipedia is empowering everyone on the planet to get involved.
[Wikipedia has some interesting methods to involve the non-connected world…capturing local knowledge through non-digital means, distributing database dumps, etc. “Wikipedia is the killer app for the OLPC.”]
The free license of Wikipedia is key. Four dimensions of free license:
1. Copy
2. Modify
3. Redistribute
4. Redistribute modified copies (commercial or not)
[He neglected to discuss the issue of share alike or the IMHO onerous GFDL license; to me, these are both restrictions on freedom.]
Wikipedia is a top 20 web site and has a broader reach than the NYT, WSJ, MSNBC, and others combined.
Two views of how Wikipedia works: emergent phenomenon/evolution - “wisdom of crowds” vs. community of thoughtful users. Wales espouses the second view. He claims that most of the active Wikipedians really know each other and that trust and communication are foundational values.
Here’s a great story from Wales: Imagine you’re designing a restaurant. You’re going to serve steak. You’ll have steak knives. Steak knives are potentially dangerous. So obviously you build cages around all the tables, right?
This story was told to make the point that “When you prevent people from doing bad things,… you often prevent them from doing good things.”
In addition, a philosophy of trying to eliminate all potential of bad often eliminates opportunities for trust.
This is a good point for schools to consider.
I’ve been searching for an argument to rampant school blocking and filtering that will resonate with conservative school board members and the like. This is a good one, as is Kevin Honeycutt’s point made at Edubloggercon:
“If you ask kids to do the right thing, 99 times out of 100, they will….Why are we zero tolerant with digital, when analog isn’t that way?”
Wales talks about the value of dialog over voting.
[Maybe Wikia should take on reforming the democratic process in the U.S.? Larry Lessig could head it up. He didn’t really belong in Congress anyway.]
My most exciting classroom experience this year - Kids, copyright, and open content
Posted by karen on May 19, 2008 in Uncategorized
[This is cross-posted from Mobile Musings. I don’t usually cross-post, but I think this is one of my most important posts and learning experiences of the year. I hope every classroom teacher who reads this will incorporate some of this into his/her classroom.]
As a part of a project in which students are writing poems to be included in a collected ebook, I had the opportunity this week to teach several groups of middle school students about copyright and open content. (I am often frustrated by teachers telling kids to “just get any image from Google to include in your Powerpoint/Word doc.”)
[For a lesson plan and accompanying resources for this, visit www.tinyurl.com/5qahht.]
Facilitating this discussion with kids was tremendously enjoyable and thought-provoking. I am sure that I learned as much as they did (and I think they learned a lot).
Here are a few of my big take-aways:
1. Relevance leads to critical thinking and engaged learning. Copyright is a topic that is immediately relevant to kids — as a result, they were highly interested and had a ton of questions, comments, and thoughts. While they were engaged, I was able to insert other topics from math, writing, and reading. I think this is a key to improving learning (and it doesn’t flow naturally from a textbook or a pacing guide).
2. In general, kids want to be legal. They are, however, seriously uninformed. (When asked about what they knew about copyright, many confused it with plagiarism. They think this is a what-I-can-do-in-school issue rather than a legal issue.) They had many questions about what they needed to do to be legal.
3. The filesharing tools these kids use (almost universally) are Lime Wire and Photobucket. For those not in the know, Lime Wire is P2P file sharing software, apparently used by kids for exchanging music illegally (being used as the new Napster or Grokster). I believed most of the kids when they told me that they didn’t understand the legal issues involved with this. Their big concern with the service: viruses.
4. Most kids were not aware of the fundamental premise of Wikipedia: that anyone can edit it. This was shocking to me. When they understood this, they found it very empowering. (Together, we edited an article about their school district — something that you’d never find on Encarta or EB.) This led to a very sophisticated discussion about the pros and cons of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. These kids got it a lot faster than most adults. We also talked about vandalism, wikispam, and version control.
5. Once the students understood the basics of copyright and open content, they quickly began discussing some pretty high level concepts about intellectual property. Unprovoked by me, they asked about financial issues, transference of copyright, IP address tracking, use of personal images (image release issues), paparazzi photos, parodies (as they relate to fair use), and lots more. It was phenomenal.
6. Kids are all over Firefox and view it as a better browser.
7. They were not familiar with the term “open source.” :( On the other hand, they expressed a universal contempt for Microsoft (to an extent that I found a little scary, but what a force for the OER community to harness).
8. Only one kid out of about 150 had ever heard of Creative Commons. How had he heard of it? YouTube.
9. They enjoyed finding open content that is legal to use in their projects. They were surprisingly adept at finding and understanding the licenses (CC, GFDL, public domain) and at including appropriate credits for the pieces used in their own work.
10. Kids who often appear bored and lacking in critical thinking and articulate communication skills suddenly seem like geniuses when they are discussing something that matters to them.
———–
What fun! My mind is still reeling at all the epiphanies I had during these few days.
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