So I’m looking at pretty bleak odds right now in terms of getting home from beautiful Monterey (where I got the experience of presenting on the TED stage even though it wan’t the TED conference) because there is this big blob of icy snow blue over New Jersey on the weather maps today. But this [...]

A nice column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday by Lee Gomes that rightly points out that the best part of Wikipedia are the discussions that occur behind the entries themselves. This is my experience too, these days: Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive experience—so much so that it’s become my habit [...]

So before my flight home got canceled, I had a great day just outside of Green Bay speaking to superintendents and principals at the FIEL conference about the Germanic influences on the English language. I mean…um…the Read/Write/Connect/Reflect Web. But here was just a classic teachable moment: I’m showing how the last 500 edits in Wikipedia occurred [...]

So a teacher named Diane Albanese came up to me before a presentation I was giving at the Delaware Instructional Technology Conference this morning and handed me this business card. Her students were presenting in a showcase last night and were handing out these little puppies…even gave one to the Lt. Governor. Now how cool [...]

Citizendium, the “project, started by a founder of Wikipedia [which] aims to improve on the Wikipedia model with accountability and academic-quality articles as cornerstones of its work” goes live in beta today. They have 180 expert editors and 800 authors that have already worked on 1,000 articles. They also have “constables” which are: friendly, hard-working folks [...]

(Via Smart Mobs) So here is a research study (and I mean research, full of all sorts of funny looking formulas and symbols and stuff) about Wikipedia that comes to the conclusion that the more edits there are to a particular article the more accurate it is. Not surprising, to me at least, but since [...]

So the project wiki run continues with this entry from Chris Craft in South Carolina whose students are prepping for a flat-ish Skype call with students at the American School in Lima, Peru next month. In this iteration, groups of kids are studying various aspects of the Peruvian culture and economy that will serve as [...]

Ok…sit down before you check this out. If you want to see the potential of what we can do with this stuff, take a look at what Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis have created in their Flat Classroom Project. Julie, who is at the International School Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Vicki who is at Westwood High [...]

Two fifth grade reading classes in Georgia have put together what I think is a great example of a book study wiki filled with information about the book itself and contextual information including photo slide shows, audio recordings of student performances, interviews and historical reports. The book is Patricia Beatty’s Turn Homeward Hannalee. One thing [...]

Stephen points to a listing of Wikipedia school and university projects that gives some interesting examples of how we might think about teaching Wikipedia. Most of these are higher ed examples, but I think many are still relevant for K-12. There are a fair amount of suggested uses for Wikipedia in the classroom [...]