Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.10.11 | Encouraging professors and their students to improve Wikipedia; What Apple’s new iCloud has to offer educators; and learning from maker kids at TEDxKids in Brussels and young digital artists in Chicago.

5,800 Pages of Content: At Read Write Web, Audrey Watters reports this week on Wikimedia Foundation’s efforts to encourage those in higher education to contribute quality content to the online encyclopedia.

The foundation has just wrapped up a pilot project to bring Wikipedia editing into university classrooms. The Public Policy Initiative introduced over 800 students to Wikipedia editing as part of their coursework. Incredibly, these students added more than 5,800 pages of content to Wikipedia.

But the important point, as Watters notes, “wasn’t simply about adding more content, it was about quality content, and the Wikimedia Foundation boasts that the public policy articles improved by 140%, based on a scoring system that experts use to assess materials.”

Another part of the project is the Wikipedia Ambassador Program, which aims to reach out to new potential contributors to the site—particularly professors who want to incorporate Wikipedia into the classroom and students who are assigned to edit Wikipedia.

For more on the ambassador program, listen to “Wikipedia in the Classroom: Changing the Way Teachers and Students Use Wikipedia.” This helpful seminar from the nonprofit association Educause was recorded earlier this year and features Yonatan Moskowitz, a Wikimedia campus ambassador at Georgetown University, and Annie Lin, the foundation’s campus team coordinator, talking about the project and sharing examples of how Wikipedia is being used in classrooms. You can listen to the full seminar at the Educause website archive.

Take Charge of Your Science: Academics at the Association for Psychological Science’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., last month were also talking Wikipedia. Members called on their colleagues to “Take Charge of Your Science” and to join the APS Wikipedia Initiative to “make sure Wikipedia—the world’s No. 1 online encyclopedia—represents psychology fully and accurately,” according to a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Despite it’s reputation among some in the ivory tower as being a less-than-rigorous form of scholarship, organizers say professors are motivated to participate by a responsibility to correct inaccuracies in what has become a public face of their field.

The initiative includes a new portal designed to make it easier for academics to write and edit Wikipedia entries and a social network to link scholars who share interests. There are also tutorials on how to make Wikipedia part of course assignments.

What the iCloud Can Offer Educators: Apple introduced the iCloud at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. The new service will automatically store music, photos, apps, calendars and documents online and wirelessly push them to all devices—computers, iPhones, iPads and iPods—providing updates almost instantly.

Can these products be helpful for educators? Greg Swanson, blogging at Apps for Education, says iCloud could make mobile learning much easier to implement:

A student can sync a photo taken from the yard or even a different location or even an excursion back to the classroom. This could open up a whole new range of educational experiences for schools and brings a whole new meaning to the term “bring your own device”.

As he points out, students will never again have an excuse for “leaving your homework at home”—they can just access it on the iCloud. Students will be able to walk away from work on a school desktop and seamlessly pick up where they left off at home.

But over at MindShift, Tina Barseghian says that despite the promise of cloud computing, schools should be wary of being locked-in to Apple as a vendor, which may “restrict rather than open the possibilities for collaboration.”

[T]he major problem with iCloud is that it works only with Apple products. If you use a Mac at school but have an Android mobile phone, or if you use an iPhone but have a Windows computer at school and a Mac at home, then syncing isn’t so seamless. iCloud doesn’t really fulfill the promise of “access anywhere.”

Furthermore, along with the need for people to move their own data across their personal devices, people are increasingly needing to share this information with others. Google Docs and Dropbox, for example, have both seen widespread adoption in schools because of the ability to do just this — collaborate and share — without a restriction on device or operating system.

It may be that Apple has more in store with its iCloud product that will make it better suited for education. The company will have to do precisely this if it wants to be able to compete with other major technology companies that have already made advances on this front, such as Google Apps for Education or Microsoft Live@edu.

Plus: For more on cloud computing, read “No Software, No Desktop: What Will a Web-Based One-to-One Computing Model Mean for Schools?”

Learning from Maker Kids: Over at the Mozilla Foundation, Matt Thompson blogs about his visit to the TEDxKids@Brussels conference in Belgium last week. The event’s theme was “Maker Kids” and Thompson attended as part of his work with Hackasaurus, a new tool developed by Mozilla to teach programming and allow kids to remix and improve the web.

The Hackasaurus team joined a day of workshops and mini-maker faires for 10-year-olds on everything from building their own chairs to remixing their own hip hop singles.

Thompson says the day offered a taste of “how the DIY maker spirit is revitalizing learning.”

There’s a renaissance stirring. Talking about educational reform once seemed dry as dust — now it’s a topic full of life and magic. Dave Eggers’ 826 Valencia project, with its Pirate and Superhero Supply Stores. Quest to Learn and its “video game school.” DIY U. The Tinkering School and “50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do.” HASTAC’s Future Class. MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning community and its vision for Connected Learning.

Something’s up. It’s a diverse movement of youth, educators and edu-preneurs attacking the idea that learning has to be boring, difficult, or confined to school.

Advice Needed: Speaking of Hackasaurus, the Hackasaurus team is looking for help testing out its new X-Ray Goggles tool. You can try it out here and submit your feedback about how to make it easier for kids to use. And learn more about the tool in this Spotlight video, “Using Goggles to Change Google.”

Digital Showcase: Finally, as the school year comes to a close, this is the week for final presentations and concerts. We enjoyed this video from the talented teens at Chicago’s Digital Youth Network. The program, which teaches kids to be meaningful producers of digital media, recently expanded to schools in five economically disadvantaged communities in Chicago.