Shifted Learning is a term I’m using frequently as I talk to people about the impact of technology in education. The best single example continues to be wikipedia. I’ll argue every and twice on Sundays for the value of wikipedia.
Scot McLeod pointed me to this and Will Richardson via his del.icio.us account led me to this which Ewan Mcintosh also found here.
Key quotes:
Please don’t tell me that Wikipedia isn’t a real encyclopedia or one that can’t be trusted. Perhaps it can’t be trusted if you’re prepping for a Presidential debate, but it is sure good enough to help me learn what I need to learn–which is how to quickly take a bunch of facts and turn them into a new and useful idea. Here’s what just about every exam ought to be: “Use Firefox to find the information you need to answer this question:” And as the internet gets smarter, the questions are going to have to get harder. Which is a good thing. Until teachers get unstuck, our kids are going to be stuck and so will we.
…a professor at the university’s Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences program, tried to do for the first time last fall by requiring term papers to be submitted to the popular, user-edited online encyclopedia.
onstant revisions by regular contributors. Brockhaus suggested that was part of the experience, and that students posting material to the site would have to stop viewing their work as “sacrosanct.”
But being subject to editing led to a potential problem: Wikipedia editors didn’t find some of the students’ articles relevant enough to warrant their own topics. They were either deleted or merged with existing articles. That reality is in part a function of Wikipedia’s vast breadth, which already covers virtually any topic in which there is sufficient public knowledge.
Maybe we should include it on resumes or portfolios: “What wikipedia articles have you contributed to?”
Technorati Tags: wikipedia, sethgodin, scottmcleod, ewanmcintosh, willrichardson
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Take 2.
I agree with you that Wikipedia is likely the poster child of “shifted learning”. However, in the same breath, I’d have to mention that Wikipedia wouldn’t have been possible with out Linux and the GNU GPL. And the collaborative processes of computer science going way back to the 1960’s really led up to that.
And in saying that, I treat Linux in the same way I treat Wikipedia in that I feel the content/product is not nearly as important as the processes and philosophies inherent in these tools. I’ve often said that a Wikipedia page is not nearly as important as the discussion (conversation) behind the page.
That wasn’t quite what I said before, but it will have to do.
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I agree. One of the points I like to mention is the ability to aggregate a number of news sources together when current events occur to get a better understanding of the whole picture than what you would get from a particular new source. Is 1 news source better than the aggregated facts from 100 new sources referencing the same event?
Nice Site!