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Wikimedia and the Future of Public Media
As of this week, I am officially part of Wikimedia's advisory board. I'm super excited to be part of the Wikimedia team and community, and am feeling rosy about the promise of all I will learn and hopefully even contribute. Like hordes of other net users, I rely on Wikipedia almost daily as my outboard brain, a taken-for-granted benefit of living in a networked age. I've made some edits and contributions to Wikipedia along the way, but mostly I've treated it as a public resource there for the taking. When I visited Wikimedia a few months ago, and took a look at their developing strategic plan, it was my first sustained look at some of the complexities of infrastructure and governance that lurk beneath the surface of a public resource that is quietly indispensable in my life.… more
10 Innovative Digital Media & Learning Projects Win $1.7M
The results of the MacArthur Foundation's 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition are in, and the 10 winning projects can’t help but to inspire anyone even remotely interested in understanding the potential of the Internet and digital technology to transform learning and knowledge creation. Among the winners: a project to show youth-produced videos on 2,200 Los Angeles city buses and an initiative that will use webcasting, video blogging, and social networking to connect kids from Chicago's West Side with kids in Fiji to work together to protect Fiji's coral reefs.… more
In Praise of Mo' Better Grading
Meanwhile, back at the pedagogical ranch...You may remember that back in November I reported on my experiment in grading, combining the long tradition of contract grading with what I call “crowdsourced grading.” Since I was already constructing “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” (ISIS 120) as a peer-taught course, I decided that the students responsible for team-leading each class would also be responsible for determining if that week’s required blogs on their reading assignments measured up to the contract standard. It didn’t seem like such a radical idea. This is a course on cognition and collaboration in the digital age and responsible evaluation, feedback, and participation are part of that equation. I thought of this as simply “practicing what I was preaching,” an object lesson to the students in how to be responsible public citizens of the Internet. Well, some people thought of it differently. They acted as if “Prof Davidson” was destroying civilization as we knew it.… more