Shaping Knowledge

A few weeks ago I watched a online video of Dave Weinberger about the shape of knowledge. He was thinking about what is the shape of knowledge, and also about the shape knowledge is in. Interesting stuff.

I was thinking abou this as I watched the kids in my class work on the first wiki we have ever used in class. When we first started using this tool, the kids were of course excited, but it soon faded into the back of their minds and became a tool which was forgotten by many people. I had to remind the kids to posting their important information on the wiki and remind them that they were creating a space for the beneift of all of the people in our class (and for whoever else may stumble across this resource).

But they seemed to leave it alone.

Then the unit we were working on began to come to a close and a unit-ending test loomed up in their headlights. The importance of the wiki grew in their eyes. They now saw the benefits of a space such as this which contained all of their information.

Editing this was also an interesting event with the kids. I gave them classtime over the last several days to add what they felt needed to be added to "flesh out" this space. We had 20 pages created. I put the kids into pairs and they chose two pages to work on. On these pages, they had 3 specific tasks to accomplish:

1.) Edit the information that was already on the page.

2.) Add to, and improve the information that was already there.

3.) Add completely new information to make the page more complete and informative.

The most interesting discussions surrounded the second task. At first, many of the kids were reluctant to do this. They were reluctant to change something that their classmates had previously written. Discussions surrounded the idea of this being appropriate. Do we have the right to change something that someone else has written? Won't they be mad? We stopped and discussed knowledge and the fact that knowledge is continually and constantly changing. We also discussed the experience we have had on our blogs this last week and the number of people who are reading them since the Blogging 101 article came out. They understood the idea of audience now. They understood that other people will be using this resource and that it needs to be the best it can possibly be.

Shaping knowledge. Improving knowledge to make it more complete, truthful, valuable, and accessible. Not lessons that are often worked with in classrooms. Too often we treat knowledge as complete, as finished, as a product that has been done for us by others; and our kids get this same impression. They get to believe over time that the work of creating and shaping knowledge belongs to other "smart" people. They get to believe that as students, all they need to do is sit and be a passive recipient of what is already out there.

These few simple days spent correcting and adding information to our wiki was an interesting beginning to changing some of their attitudes towards the shaping and moulding (hopefully not the "molding";) of knowledge.

We are also beginning to create our scripts for our short math tutorial videos which we are going to place online. Hopefully this project will also help the kids to see that they have knowledge that can be shaped and moulded to be useful for others. They can be the creators of information and knowledge that others can use.

BTW, does anyone have ideas about where we could post these videos? I'm looking for webspace. Please let me know if you have any ideas for us. Thanks.

Comments

[Dean Shareski]

Clarence,

Consider ourmedia.org or internetarchive for free hosting.

[Brian Mull]

What wiki tool are you using? Are your kids adding their info to Wikipedia, or do you have a wiki program on your servers? Would you mind sharing how yours are setup?

[WIll Richardson]

Great post Clarence. I'm envious. We're trying to get some real wiki-ing started here but it's been a struggle. Thanks for showing the way.