e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Wikipedia

  • More on Evolving the Wikipedia Prior Art Page

    Update: How annoying. Even with the URL escaped in my post and the emoticon module turned off in ExpressionEngine, the software insists on rendering the key combination of a colon followed by a P in the URL as a smiley face. I really must find somebody who can help me migrate to WordPress….

    Thanks to the help of experienced Wikipedians, we have some helpful critiques of the History of Virtual Learning Environments page. You can see them on the peer review page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
    Peer_review/History_of_virtual_learning_environments    ) and the discussion page for the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
    Talk:History_of_virtual_learning_environments    ). Sorry these aren’t active hyperlinks. For some reason, the colons in the URLs appear to be confusing ExpressionEngine so it renders the hyperlinks funny.

    Please lend a hand by helping to implement the suggested edits.

  • Wikipedia Page Call for Reviewers

    With some encouragement from Seb Schmoller and David Jennings, I searched for and found a way to ask Wikipedia editors at-large to peer review our History of Virtual Learning Environments page for tone and for compliance with their style guide. (You’ll see an icon and text box to this effect prominently displayed at the top of the wiki page.) We want our contributions to be factual, fair, and consistent with the spirit of the Wikipedia project.

  • Taking the Wikipedia Prior Art Effort to the Next Level

    The wikipedia prior art effort has been spectacularly successful so far, racking up close to 200 additions and changes in just a few days. I believe this work has significant intrinsic value in addition to its potential legal value. At any rate, I’d love to see us take our game up another notch.

    Now that many of the basic historic innovations have been documented on the page (not that we should stop doing that), I’d like to see more of the items listed linked to their own Wikipedia entries that provide more detail. If you’re looking for good examples, check out the entries for PLATO and Moodle. If possible–and this is important–they would provide a link to changelogs in the “External Links” section of the entry and/or a narrative summary of the important milestones in the product’s development within the entry itself. We want to make available as much detail as possible about specific developments in each project or product. If you need help reconstructing that information, Scott Leslie recommends using the Wayback Machine to visit an archived copy of Landonline, the precursor to Edutools.

    tags: , ,

  • Wikipedia Page on History of the VLE Gathers Prior Art Info

    As you may know, patents can be invalidated if one can demonstrate that the claimed invention was in public use or described in a published document prior to the date of the patent filing. This evidence is called “prior art.” A few of us decided that we should begin documenting prior art–not just on the Blackboard patent, but on educational technologies in general. We debated a bit about where to house the effort. I ended up creating a one-sentence stub in wikipedia on Sunday (two days ago). A couple of people mentioned it on a couple of listservs, but we didn’t advertise it widely. And yet, lo and behold, two days later we have a pretty good document that was generated by a variety of people. This morning, a colleague whom I had not spoken to about the page emailed me to point me to it and suggested that I contribute. And tonight, Stephen posted about it, which means the cat is out of the bag for sure.

    The internet is a wonderful thing.

    At any rate, if you have any important data to add to the page about the history of VLE development, please do so. I imagine we will eventually spawn a family of pages about related technologies (whiteboards, LCMS’s, etc.). This would be a Good Thing To Do even if the Blackboard patent fight didn’t exist.

  • Teaching Faculty About Wikipedia (and Social Software in General)

    I just discovered Jon Udell’s wonderfully archeological screencast about the evolution of a wikipedia page. In eight and a half minutes, he beautifully demonstrates how a community negotiates knowledge construction when nobody is the boss, anybody can edit, and there are no formal processes. As we know, this is a particularly vexing question to many faculty, who are used to editorial authority being defined by a single blessed and credentialed editor or a small number of blessed and credentialed jurors in highly specialized content domains. In contrast, Udell takes an extremely specialized topic–the history and conventions of using umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands–and shows how entirely different editorial mechanisms can work very effectively.

    If you do share this with your faculty colleagues, I recommend emphasizing the following points: (more…)

  • The Promise and Perils of Social Software

    My friend Joe Ugoretz has a new article on social software in the Academic Commons. He provides a good overview of a number of social software tools and suggestions about how to use them. But also embedded in his piece is a warning about what happens if we fail to embrace the new technologies and make them our own. (more…)