Serendipity35

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” — Ben Franklin

If you're looking for a resolution for the new year, you might look to Ben Franklin as a model.

Benjamin Franklin's father dreamt of sending him to Harvard University. But he had a big family to support and was not wealthy. With 17 children, Josiah and Abiah Franklin could only afford two years of schooling for Benjamin. Instead, they made him work, and when he was 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James who was a printer in Boston.

The printing business gave Benjamin the opportunity to read books and pamphlets which was his Internet. He read everything, and taught himself every skill and discipline one could absorb from text.

Ben wrote later that he was determined to fix this lack of education by investing several hours each day in reading and self-education. Of course, self-learning is not schooling, but long-term it can have a significant effect.

Long before "massive open online courses," the idea of 10,000 hours for mastery and "personal learning networks," Franklin calculated that by reading an hour or more daily in a chosen field, he would read approximately one book per week. One book per week translates into roughly 50 per year, and that would make him "expert" in a field within 3 years.

You may not be seeking expertise and you might choose a field where expertise requires more than just "book learning." And you might want a more "liberal arts" education, and so you might read in a number of fields instead of one. Still, Ben's plan is not a bad one to undertake in the new year.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” - Benjamin Franklin



 

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus column posted its top ten stories with readers from 2014. I don't one trend dominating their technology on campus world, as there are ones on pedagogy, publishing, interacting with parents (surprising in that we associate that more with K-12 teaching), libraries, online security and the tools and trends. Wired Campus points out that there articles often crossover into the mainstream press coverage of technology because technology itself is so mainstream. Most major news outlets in print, on TV or on the Net have technology reporters. Based on reader clicks, these were the 10 top articles:

1. Are Courses Outdated? MIT Considers Offering ‘Modules’ Instead


2. Taking Notes by Hand Benefits Recall, Researchers Find


3. Why One Professor Thinks Academics Should Write ‘BuzzFeed-Style Scholarship’


4. 6 Technologies Will Change Colleges in Coming Years, Experts Say


5. 5 Things Researchers Have Discovered About MOOCs


6. The ‘Heartbleed’ Bug and How Internet Users Can Protect Themselves


7. This Guy Drew a Cat. You Won’t Believe What Happened 4 Centuries Later


8. Video: Tech Tools Students Say They Can’t Live Without


9. How Streaming Media Could Threaten the Mission of Libraries


10. U. of Tennessee at Martin Encourages Helicopter Parents to Hover

"Big-Data Scientists Face Ethical Challenges After Facebook Study" By Paul Voosen from http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Data-Scientists-Face/150871/

"Jeffrey Hancock, a Cornell U. professor who teamed up with Facebook on a controversial study of emotion online, says the experience has led him to think about how to continue such collaborations “in ways that users feel protected, that academics feel protected, and industry feels protected.”
Last summer the technologists discovered how unaware everyone else was of this new world.

After Facebook, in collaboration with two academics, published a study showing how positive or negative language spreads among its users, a viral storm erupted. Facebook "controls emotions," headlines yelled. Jeffrey T. Hancock, a Cornell University professor of communications and information science who collaborated with Facebook, drew harsh scrutiny. The study was the most shared scientific article of the year on social media. Some critics called for a government investigation.

Much of the heat was fed by hype, mistakes, and underreporting. But the experiment also revealed problems for computational social science that remain unresolved. Several months after the study’s publication, Mr. Hancock broke a media silence and told The New York Times that he would like to help the scientific world address those problems"

 

Dariusz Jemielniak is a professor of management at Kozminski University, in Poland, a Wikimedia activist, and author of Common Knowledge: An Ethnography of Wikipedia. He views  Wikipedia as a professor's best friend.  He quotes Michael Gorman, a former president of the American Library Association, who wrote some years ago that "a professor who encourages the use of Wikipedia is the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything."

Jemielniak not only recommends that his students use Wikipedia but also encourages them to edit and develop it. I tried the same thing with my graduate students about 5 years ago. I wanted them to (1) find a topic in our area of study that has no Wikipedia article (2) create an account and post a first version (3) make additional contributions and get the article to survive until the end of the semester. They told me it was one of the hardest assignments we did. Some could barely get past part one.

I often think that teachers are fearful of Wikipedia because they don't really understand how it works. "Anyone can change something," they say, and that is true. But see if the change lasts. If it's inaccurate or opinion, it will vanish quickly.

Even though studies going back to 2005 show that Wikipedia does not have significantly more errors than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, people doubt it. Teachers at all levels may tell students "You're not allowed to use it in in your research" (as if they could actually monitor student research at all), but those teachers are very likely to use Wikipedia in their own informal or formal research.

Wikipedia has significantly grown and improved in the past decade and it's no surprise that articles often turn up at the top of search results. Everyone uses it.

Jemielniak thinks that the "real reasons for the general dislike of Wikipedia among scholars" is because they are used to having a "monopoly on knowledge production." The idea of these open-source loonies creating and managing knowledge without anyone wanting remuneration or even credit is absurd.

Do students plagiarize from Wikipedia? Yes, as they once did from books and have more easily done ever since we had word processing and the Internet.

And yet, the American Sociological Association and the American Psychological Association have started initiatives aimed at encouraging scholars and students to help develop Wikipedia.

One project I like is the Wikipedia Education Program which carries the tagline: "The end of throwaway assignments and the beginning of real-world impact for student editors."

It's not a difficult idea to use. Professors around the world assign their students to use Wikipedia to contribute to articles on course-related topics. More than 6,500 students have participated in the Wikipedia Education Program around the
world, adding the equivalent of 45,000 printed pages of quality content to more than 10,000 Wikipedia articles in multiple languages.

Writing a Wikipedia article is an excellent academic assignment that requires research, synthesizing facts, teaches how to properly use third-party sources, and is resilient to plagiarism. Wikipedians (those monitors of the pages) are more watchful for signs of plagiarism than teachers.

Just that first part of my assignment - finding a topic that is not yet covered on Wikipedia - requires imagination and a need to review sources with an eye to finding research gaps. These assignments have a life online too. They don't get a glance at the grade and a toss into the recycle basket. Some students remain connected to the article and monitor changes, and continue to write and edit other articles. I've never had a student write another essay that wasn't assigned.

The idea of sharing knowledge with those who do not have the knowledge or easy access also seems to be an ethical obligation that faculty and students should recognize and participate in making better.

One site I found is Adrianne Wadewitz's HASTAC blog. She was hired as an educational consultant by the Wikimedia Foundation and posts about teaching with Wikipedia and especially on gender.

Following the links below, teachers and students can use available instructions and training from Wikipedia on how to do this activity in an academic setting.

Just looking at the second of Wikipedia’s Five Pillars is a worthwhile discussion in any class involving writing:

"Wikipedia has a neutral point of view.
- Strive for articles that document and explain the major points of view in a balanced and impartial manner.
- Avoid advocacy. Characterize information and issues rather than debate them.
- In some areas there may be just one well-recognized point of view; in other areas we describe multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and in context, and NOT presenting any point of view as "the truth" or "the best view".
Please note: All article content should be verifiable based on published material. That means citing published, authoritative sources, especially on controversial topics and when the subject is a living person. Unreferenced material can be removed. Articles should not feature editors' personal experiences, interpretations, or opinions."

Good writing advice to all writers in all settings.

Further Reading

Download a nice 12 page PDF on How to_Use_Wikipedia_as_a_Teaching_Tool

Get involved as a teacher with the Wikipedia Education Program or as a student