I had drafted a post on concept 2 that I had been looking up on a Wednesday morning on Wikipedia, but that post got lost, somehow 
But I still know what it all was about, even though I cannot remember all the details of the text that I had written…
I’ve corrected the orthography of ONE word in the Luxembourgish edition of Wikipedia on Serge Tonnar, a musician I’ve been listening to quite a lot recently.
I agree with anybody who would say that changing one letter is not a huge contribution… but I felt that not correcting this orthographic error would have been a mistake, especially for someone who has “promised to become an active and pro-active wikipedian” 
I’m giving a lecture today about teaching with multimedia and hypermedia and I was thinking about looking up examples of such educational media on Wikipedia…
To my big surprise, I had to discover that “educational media” was not (and still is not) defined and explained on Wikipedia!
I do think that this concept needs to be included because 1) it is a concept that I encounter on anext to weekly basis, so it needs to be defined in any respectable encyclopedia and 2) it needs to be distinguished from the concept of educational technology (which has an entry in Wikipedia).
At a more personal level, I would love to able to send people over to Wikipedia when they ask me what I mean by educational media (or edmedia in short)…
Today, I decided to install the following pro-active routine for my contribution to Project AoW:
Once a week, let’s say every Wednesday morning during my commute to Walferdange, I look up a concept on Wikipedia that is on my mind that morning (for whatever reason), and check if an entry exists.
If I don’t find an entry, then I will blog about it here and try to argue why it would be beneficial to have an entry about that concept on Wikipedia. Eventually, if I convince myself or you do, I will then start an article about that concept…
If there is an entry, then I will check if all the presented information is correct, to my best knowledge, and eventually I will edit the article… and blog about it here…
I’ve recently decided, together with my college and friend Benoît Majerus, to answer the call issued by the Wikimedia Foundation, asking academics to actively contribute to the largest, free, online encyclopedic repository of human knowledge in the known universe that we all resort to when we want to look up a concept or fact: Wikipedia.
We’re currently writing up a manifest to answer this call and try to convince our fellow academics to join us in making a small, but valuable, contribution to this growing body of shared collective knowledge…
(Virtually) everybody uses Wikipedia these days as a reference tool, so why not putting some effort into making it better every day?
Afterall, we, as academics, are in a rather privileged position when it comes to knowledge, its creation, production, publication and discussion… and we should contribute to the education of the global community, because we do believe that knowledge is power!
I will blog about our way of reacting to this call in order to 1) document, reflect and share my personal experiences with you, my readers and 2) gather your comments and reactions. So I really hope you’ll give me your thoughts to feed on…
By the way, if you have any ideas for good reasons to get more academics onto Wikipedia, please send in your thoughts!
I just got an invitation to the CCK1 event on facebook, via the group on connectivism and connective knowledge:
Connectivism and Connective Knowledge is an open online course that over 12 weeks explores the concepts of connectivism and connective knowledge and explore their application as a framework for theories of teaching and learning. Participation is open to everyone and there are no fees or subscriptions required.
[http://cck11.mooc.ca/]
This event got my attention for various reasons:
- I’m currently giving a lecture on Education in the Digital Age and I’m very much interested in the transformative effects that ICT and digital media can/could/should have on our current educational systems and in the effects that they already had/have on learning processes in the everyday lives of so many people around the globe (even, or mostly, outside of formal educational settings). So I thought it might be profitable to “take” this cck11 course and see what new inspirational ideas this experience might yield in and for me…
- Moreover, I’ve been a student of connectionism since the late 1990ies, working in the lab of Axel Cleeremans (a former student of one of the founding fathers of connectionism). Therefore connectivism as a theory of learning and teaching sounded like something familiar yet new to me. It appears to me as something that I might want to explore deeper, because it nicely connects (pun intended) with my existing expertise and with my current research and teaching activities.
I’ll keep you posted about my learning experiences on this blog… I will for instance try to explore the idea of how “successful” my learning will be… because I’m currently also giving a course on the “successfulness” of teaching methods & strategies and I’m more and more becoming aware of the lack of proper empirical research on this aspect of many “pedagogical recommendations”… I see a lot of wishful thinking in pedagogy and little empirical evidence of the claimed results and outcomes.
I’m really looking forward to this course and the people & ideas that I will likely encounter on this journey… You’re welcome to join too, it’s open and free!
The OpenLibrary project aims at creating a web-page for each and every book (paper-based and digital books) that has been published by any member of humanity.
http://openlibrary.org/
I’ve started to contribute my modest share of time by referencing the books I’ve been editing for the last few years, containing my students written reports on their works on Lev Vygostky’s approach to learning and education. Okay, that may seem to be a bit self-serving, but hey, who else is going to add “my” books to the OpenLibrary?
I hope to add more books to this library in the future… because I do think that it is a great project to create a digital archive of ALL books, if it only were to be able to search for any book in a free and open database…
I’m very happy about a recent book that I discovered thanks to my wife: Remo H. Largo’s (2010) “Lernen geht anders. Bildung und Erziehung vom Kind her denken”; actually because it starts with some 20 introductory pages where Largo convincingly shows how society has dramatically changed during the last 20-30 years and how schooling and educating simply will have to change under these pressures, amongst which he stresses the cultural pressures generated by the so-called digital revolution!
A must-read for my first year BScE students!
Have you ever wondered where the name “Raiffeisen” comes from? Well, I never intended to look it up… but today, when searching for something else related to the Banque Raiffeisen, I suddenly found out why the bank is called that way, in Luxembourg, Austria, Germany, Switzerland to name only a few countries…
It comes from the name of the man who invented the “cooperative bank” principle… Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen (see here for full details about his bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Wilhelm_Raiffeisen)
I could’ve thought about such a possibility, but it strangely never came to my mind that the bank could be named after a person… nice to know…
I’ve just read an online article about what Google CEO Schmidt thinks about the future of the Internet, especially that he thinks that anonymity on the web will and should be something of the past… I thought that some people would fall into the trap of confusing anonymity and privacy, so I thought it might be “my duty” to help keep these two concepts apart…
Here is the article itself… my comment can be found below the text…
http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/google-ceo-schmidt-no-anonymity-future-web
But you, my dear blog readers, don’t have to go there, you can easily read on here and see what I’ve had to say/write about anonymity and privacy… Keep in mind that I wrote it for a public audience @networkworld.com – where I’m hardly a recognized or even known author…
Anonymity and privacy are two different, even if connected, concepts and we should not confuse them here! Anonymity is something that was “invented” or incidentally generated at a very large scale with the advent of the Internet, where people “come together” on a global scene that would “normally” (i.e., without digital technology) not have met… of course here I am anonymous in the sense that most of you (who read what I write) will not know me, personally… Imagine a pre-internet equivalent of this situation… Imagine we would meet, in person, for some reason, on a “forum”, a public place… and I would start telling you what I’m currently telling you now… how could I expect to be anonymous? in the sense that nobody would know that it’s me who’s performing the act that I’m performing… of course, to most of my audience, I would probably still be just some human being, that they don’t really know; but it would be possible to determine that I’m the source of this performance… in that sense I would not be anonymous… I think that’s what Schmidt is referring to, that it may seem reasonable (I don’t necessarily agree on that…) to re-establish AUTHORSHIP for acts done in the public place, which has been the “normal” state of affairs for ages and was clouded by the possibilities of the world-wide-web and the huge amount of people between which every single human author was hidden…
That’s a very different thing than privacy… Privacy is the right to be the author of certain acts in private places, disclosed from the public place and not meant to be directed to other people than those intended by these very acts… In a private place you rarely act in an anonymous way… people you direct your acts towards CAN generally very well tell (you or anybody else who cares to ask) that YOU were the author of that act… but we generally expect them not to tell anybody else, not involved in these acts… It thus seems to me, that “normally” privacy leads to non anonymity…
I’m not trying to argue that the web should become an all-public place, where no privacy is possible… I just think that we probably need some processes that will allow, under legal circumstances to be clearly defined, to establish authorship and personal identity… I don’t like to be fooled by other people, who can hide their identity or even fake to be somebody else… On the other hand, the end of anonymity does not logically have to mean that everything an identified or identifiable author does should be automatically and directly disclosed to a wider audience than the intended audience…
I’ve just written my first App Review on the iTunes Store Luxembourg.
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“innovative Fingernavigation” sieht anders aus…
Es war zu erwarten, dass die “grösste” Luxemburger Tageszeitung “mit der Zeit gehen” würde und als App für das iPad kommen musste! Das Resultat ist aber mehr als enttäuschend! Von innovativer Fingernavigation, wie man es vom iPad gewohnt ist, und auch bei anderen eNewspaper und eMagazine Apps gesehen und erlebt hat, kann man hier leider überhaupt nicht reden… Zoomen mit dem Doppelklick ähnelt hier von der Animation her dem was man nur als sehr unsanft und unästhetisch bezeichnen kann! Das Blättern der Seiten ist genau so abgehackt und den Lesefluss hemmend. Nur gut, dass die vorliegende Version der App gratis ist und die täglichen Inhalte bis September 2010 auch gratis zur Verfügung stehen… man glaubt zu ahnen weshalb! Es wird dringend nötig sein das Konzept der eNewspaper zu überdenken, denn momentan sieht es einfach so aus, als ob die pre-press print-ready Dateien einfach in eine iPad App geladen werden, ohne dass jemand sich wirklich Gedanken gemacht hätte wie man mit dem iPad mit Inhalten interagiert. Frei nach dem Motto: Mal schnell eine iPad App ins Netz stellen, damit man Vorne bei ist… Nationale “Medienriesen” wie das Wort können sich so etwas wahrscheinlich noch leisten und trotzdem erfolgreich sein…
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