I next went to the recommended reading, the Wikinomics website. There, after some perusal, I came across “Beyond the Classroom” in the Wikinomics wiki, which is taking the ideas of Wikinomics and applying them to the educational setting. I have a few comments and questions:
• Are file cabinets really the current common shared curriculum storage option? Haven’t most schools been using shared servers for some time?
• Doesn’t a database of quizzes, lesson plans seem to be contradictory to the co-constructing of the curriculum as proposed earlier in the writing?
• Why are we talking of totally transforming education yet still discussing textbooks? In other areas text book learning is spurned so why are we figuring out how to do more textbooks?
"(In our classroom wiki) 97% of edits (over 9000 overall) were student-generated. . . . This is largely due to there being an explicit requirement to participate - without the reward of grades, I'm not entirely sure if there would be as much effort."
• So is this the 21st century extrinsically motivated hoop jumping? Can’t collaborative learning that encourages analysis, evaluation, and creation also be done in f2f situations?
I think all educators will agree (and have for quite some time)on the need for and benefits of developing collaborative skills in students. And I believe some of the web-based tools will facilitate such collaboration digitally. Perhaps we need to collaborate on the above mentioned wiki.
Meanwhile I’m still struggling with the term “mass”. According to dictionary.com this adjective is “pertaining to a large number of people: i.e mass unemployment; mass migrations." So, I’m curious to find examples of collaboration that truly involve masses. Even though I used to consider Wikipedia to be a good example of mass collaboration, Clay Shirkey in Here Comes Everybody explains that there are actually just a few contributors who do the majority of the writing and work on Wikipedia. Therefore the term “mass” seems to be a misnomer. Let’s look more closely at Shirkey’s analysis and explanation of the Power Law.
“The relationship between audience size and conversational pattern. The curved line represents the power-law distribution of weblogs ranked by audience size. Weblogs at the left-hand side of the graph have so many readers that they are limited to the broadcast pattern, because you can’t interact with millions of readers. As size of readership falls, loose conversation becomes possible, because the audiences are smaller. The long tail of weblogs, with just a few readers each, can support tight conversation, where every reader is also a writer and vice-versa.”
If this so, then how can collaboration ever be “mass”?
What if?
Even if mass collaboration is not realistic , we can all agree on the collaborative mind set that is so well matched to the Web 2.0 world. Therefore, why don’t we be the change we hope to see?
• What if we had created a collaborative ISB wiki on copyright and related issues rather than individually blog about it? Imagine how powerful the collective knowledge, creativity, and original ideas might serve our community?
• What if we had created a collaborative ISB wiki for online safety (rather than individually blogging about it) to be contributed to and consulted by students, teachers, parents, and the world?
How about next time we all put effort in creating a greater “collaborative footprint”
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