Serendipity35

The first wiki was created in 1995 by Oregon programmer Ward Cunningham who named it after the "Wiki-Wiki" (meaning "quick") shuttle buses at the Honolulu Airport. They were meant to be web sites on which anyone could post material without knowing programming languages or HTML.

The most famous wiki is still Wikipedia which officially began with its first edit in January 2001, two days after the domain was registered by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. This fact comes from, of course, an article on Wikipedia about the history of Wikipedia. 

Wikipedia didn't get huge numbers of visitors immediately and it certainly didn't gain acceptance in academia for at least a decade. (Some might argue that it still isn't accepted by faculty for student use, especially when it is used in a copy/paste manner - but that's a different topic.)

I've been writing about wikis on and off since this blog started and a search on here shows 100+ mentions of "wiki" with about a third of those being actual posts about wikis. Most of that writing was in the first 15 years of this century, but I have seen some reemergence in wiki use among educators lately.

Back in 2005, I started getting into using wikis. Tim Kellers and I made one in order to teach about the use of wikis - particularly the use of open-source wiki software. It was what some would call a metawiki - a wiki about wikis.

Wikis were part of the Web 2.0 movement. when we started to think about the Internet as a place where we could build and contribute our own content rather than just read and consume.

In 2005, we were mixing wikis in with the somewhat sexier 2.0 tools like podcasting, blogging, and the photo and video sharing sites that were popping up. Then came social media and everything changed again.

That metawiki that Tim and I made 15 years ago no longer exists since neither of us is still at NJIT where it was hosted. It served its purpose which was to demonstrate to others how wikis are built, grow, get damaged and heal. It looked a lot like Wikipedia because we used the same software - Mediawiki - that was used to build Wikipedia. [Note: The wonderful archive.org did crawl our pages and you can see an archived version of our Wiki35 there.]

Brother Tim and I were doing workshops on blogs, podcasts and wikis which were three things we were sure were going to change corporations and education. Blogs and podcasts are still powerful and still growing. Wikis? Not so much.  

People often described wikis as "collaborative web sites" and they were being used for things like project management, knowledge sharing and proposal writing. The benefits of this collaborative approach include reducing daily phone calls, e-mails and meeting time as well as encouraging collaboration. The Internet research firm, the Gartner Group, predicted in 2006 that Wikis would become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009.

Midway between that prediction, I wrote in 2007 that by my calculation technology generally moves into the world of education in dog years because it seems to take about 7 years for widespread acceptance and usage. This is in comparison to the world outside education, especially if the business world.

It's not that you can (or should) use the application of new technologies in the commercial world as a gauge for what we should be doing in education, but schools certainly lag behind industry and home users in adopting and adapting technology.  

By 2015, I was writing more about the disappearance of wikis and the devolution of Web 2.0.  My own use of wikis as tools in my teaching was also winding down.

I had been using Wikispaces with students as a collaborative tool. I assigned students to work in a class wiki and also had students create their own wikis using that software. But Wikispaces started to shut down and was gone by 2018. Now you can only read about it on Wikipedia.

It has been five years since that post and I don't think I have written anything significant in the interim about wikis. Some people are still using wikis and Wikipedia is in the top ten most visited websites on the Web, but I don't see people building wikis for education (and perhaps not in corporations either).

Blogs like WordPress and DIY website services overtook wikis as free or low-cost ways to put content online in pretty packages, though few of those are collaborative in the sense of wiki collaboration.

I no longer work on any wikis other than editing Wikipedia and I don't think Tim does either. But just recently, amidst all the scrambling to get courses online due to the COVID-19 virus pandemic, I saw a few examples of wikis in education that make me think that we haven't completely hit the DELETE key on wikis.

One example is at coursehero.com with a Comparative Anatomy and Physiology course in which Dr. Glené Mynhardt has students create a wiki page on one specific animal phylum. In an article about the course, Explore More in a Survey Course with a Build-a-Wiki Project, Mynhardt explains how she uses Moodle which allows for page creation using easy cut-and-paste and drag-and-drop commands.

One missing wiki element in Moodle is that it does not allow public access which is key to the original intent of wikis. Mynhardt says “Students can view each other’s wikis, but I can’t share them with colleagues or [the public], and the students can’t share them outside the course,” so educators who want to make the work public may want to use other web page–building options. It's not Mediawiki but using these wiki tools that are in a learning management system like Blackboard or that tool in Moodle or in collaborative software such as Sharepoint or simply creating a content page in Canvas and allowing students to edit the page is a way to bring the collaborative wiki experience to students. And in this time of students sheltering at home and working online more than ever, collaboration is an important element of learning.

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

I've been helping a few teachers with their online teaching the past month as American schools closed due to the COVID19 pandemic and they were forced to become virtual teachers. Some teachers and schools were ready. Some were not.

Those that were ready had not only put in place software for conferencing and course management but had trained teachers and students to use it. They would also have determined that both groups had the hardware to use the software. I had to loan two teaching friends headsets with microphones since the stores are also closed. The very best schools had also made sure that teachers were using these tools on a regular basis for homework help, materials storage, and discussions. Some schools were already in virtual mode when there was a snowstorm or weather issue or if a student was out for an extended period.

While one teacher I worked with had his textbook online (an open textbook - hurray!) another did not. Her school had sent students home for 3 days while they did a rush training on using Google Classroom with teachers. In those 3 days, the decision was made not to reopen the school. Guess what? Many of the students had not brought home any textbooks or notebooks, and now they could not return to school. Good luck having students read chapter 11 and work on the problems at the end.

One resource that has been around for a while is Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization created in 2008 by Salman Khan with the goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students.

They offer short lessons in the form of videos and supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators. All resources are available for free to users of the website and app.

Knowing that teachers and students at this time were affected by the school closures and with social distancing Khan Academy stepped up their offerings. They give a suggested but adaptable daily study schedule to help build a routine while learning at home. For high school students prepping for college admission, recent SAT test cancellations are causing some panic. They offer FAQ about the SAT and havean  suggested SAT study plan.

Sal Khan even thought to create a meditation video playlist with simple meditation techniques to help you calm your mind, relax, and focus.

I love that they have made available a Google Form where you can ask for other resources you need that they might create. Sal is doing a daily livestream on Facebook and YouTube where he answers questions live.

It's Monday morning in America and students are headed back to classrooms. Well, most of them are headed out to a school classroom. The COVID-19 virus (AKA coronavirus) has finally put some schools into motion to consider and try to set up online learning in the event that the school is closed.

Of course, if nothing is already in place, it's too late.

An NPR headline about K-12 education says "As Schools Close Because Of Coronavirus, Nearly 300 Million Kids Aren't In Class."

A NY Times headline on higher education states "First U.S. Colleges Close Classrooms as Virus Spreads. More Could Follow." It uses the University of Washington ias an example as they move to online classes for its 50,000 students. This week finds both K-12 and colleges starting spring break, which might be a break from the problem or a time to prepare for the possibility of not reopening after the break.

In my home state of New Jersey, the state posted a directive and "guidance" to schools. Local school officials are concerned about this public health emergency. The NJDOE will count days of home learning toward the requirement that districts provide 180 days of instruction. The risk of exposure to COVID-19 in New Jersey remains low at the moment but the possibility of mandated public health school closures is real. 

The phrase "it's not a case of if but when" is being applied to COVID-19 but it also applies to less serious situations like natural disasters that close schools and even instances when teachers or students need to be home for extended periods.

Newbie schools will quickly learn that there is a lot more to online learning than "putting materials online." Some schools may be using software or a paid platform to post homework and other materials. That's not online learning. That's content management.

In preparing to move instruction online, it is too easily forgotten that training needs to be done for faculty and for students. I think back to the late 1990s when I first began teaching using the Internet and designing online courses. Both groups of users were not ready for it. Some students didn't even have the basic technology from a home computer, fast enough Internet and even smaller things like a microphone for a computer. 

The software we used included a Course Management System (at first our CMS was WebCT at the college) and additional software for watching and recording video and audio and all of it became the major training activities for the instructional technology department I managed. We tried very hard not to be known as "the WebCT people."

I had started in K-12 education and when I left there at that time we had no online learning in place. Unfortunately, for many schools, they are not that much further along today.

Certainly, money is a factor. A school district that provides students with a laptop or tablet to take home has a big advantage over one where only some students have a computer and broadband at home. In the past two decades, not everyone has gotten online or is carrying a smartphone in their pocket.

Again, having the hardware, software, and content online is only part of the solution.

The college that doesn't offer online classes is rare today, but even more rare is the college that is prepared to go fully online with all its courses, students and faculty in an emergency.

It is sad and disappointing that it takes a possible pandemic for schools to think about how they would deal with a shutdown. The capability to provide instruction when there is a weather closing or other short-term emergency should be considered as important already. 

Schools have made progress going online in the 21st century, but not enough.

Jeff Selingo is saying that something to watch this year concerning continuous learning/universal learning/60-year curriculum/lifelong learning (I'm not sure what the term du jour is) is not coming from universities but from Amazon. 

This idea that we are always learning is hardly a new idea. But the idea that schools (at all levels) should supply that learning to non-traditional students who have left the school or maybe never attended the school is fairly new. Distance-learning began in the U.S. in the late 1800s. "Distance" meant that the learning was not in a classroom.

It went from the correspondence-course model to the broadcast airwaves to the combination of snail-mailed CDs and DVDs and finally online.

Selingo says that Amazon plans to spend more than $700 million to train 100,000 employees for higher-skilled jobs over the next six years. What's missing? Any college or university to design or deliver that training.

I also think that this idea is not brand new. Companies have been designing their own training for many decades. When I started at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2000, my department was helping design and provide training courses to companies. But as the decade progressed, I noticed more companies were designing the training and we were simply the delivery method. And now, it's more likely that the company might design and deliver.

What might be different in the case of Amazon is that if it follows their past path in cloud computing this will have a different result. For the cloud, they built their own platform internally (Amazon Web Services - AWS), worked out the bugs and then licensed it to scale. Might they eventually do the same thing with their higher-skilled training?

The rate of change in the skills and training needed now is far beyond the rather slow course-creation process of higher education. Selingo says that the legacy undergraduate and graduate degree programs at traditional universities and even the certificates that came into vogue in the 21st century don't make it.

Why is that? Because they take too long, cover more than is needed, and cost too much. I helped develop corporate training and certificates, but the university always had an eye on trying to lure those learners back to the university for a degree. That's not a valid approach anymore.

"Amazon University" doesn't exist yet, but many lifelong learners are already turning to YouTube, Khan Academy, MOOCs, LinkedIn Learning, General Assembly and other sources for continuous learning opportunities.

Selingo concludes that colleges and universities need to shift their thinking from serving students to the needs of learners.

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