I went to the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) at the University of London Union last Saturday (24th April) and it was well worth giving up a Saturday for. I was already familiar with the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation after attending their workshop on Open Data and the Semantic Web in November 2009 where I gained an introduction to the community of researchers and developers who work to integrate open data into semantic web applications. The project I am currently working on as a research associate is called Ensemble and we are researching the use of semantic technologies for the enhancement of case based learning. Therefore I am interested in finding out about the educational uses of semantic technologies, particularly in higher education settings.
The OKCon started with an update on the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation given by Rufus Pollock and then each member gave a summary of their recent research. I was particularly interested to hear about potential collaborations taking place between the British library, the University Library at Cambridge and OKF as this is bound to provide some great use cases for dealing with bibliographic data in an open way.
Later in the afternoon I went to the session on community driven research where Tom Morris spoke about Citizendium and the Eduzendium program. I hadn’t actually heard of them before even though I was very familiar with Wikipedia. The main difference between Citizendium and Wikipedia seems to be that contributors to Citizendium are expected to work under their own names and that ‘experts are invited to play a gentle role in overseeing the structuring of knowledge’ (http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:About). In this way the construction of ‘knowledge’ is less open than Wikipedia, but better matched to the academic world where a publication that has undergone ‘expert peer review’ is seen as more reliable. I particularly liked the sound of Eduzendium as a program that encourages University student essays/reports to be published publicly in Citizendium. The suggestion is that a teaching activity is structured around the production of a report specifically written for the purpose of publishing in Citizendium and contributing to it’s knowledge base. Their pedagogical reasoning for this is that ‘Writing a high-quality encyclopedia article about a specific topic requires, and trains, a specific sort of effort or discipline. Simply producing a suitably informative, but neutral, definition of a concept can require a great deal of thought. Crafting a jumble of facts into a coherent narrative, which the Citizendium requires, is a difficult, but rewarding and educational task. Furthermore, it practices a very useful scholarly skill to investigate and decide on what the most reliable bibliography items for an article are.’ This process of defining and crafting relates well to activities that I have observed and developed whilst researching case-based learning at three different Universities. I have thought of it as students building a case but there is a more fundamental aspect to it relating to the cognitive processes of organizing information or from a collaborative learning perspective this programme supports the joint production of an account and the co-construction of knowledge. I wonder what the people at Eduzendium think about the nature of ‘knowledge’ though? They talk about ‘fundamental’ concepts and ‘communicating the meaning of the basic and essential issues of our knowledge world’. My involvement with the Threshold Concepts project at the University of Cambridge in 2006 has made me well aware of the disparities that lie between different disciplinary understandings of foundational concepts. Personally I see knowledge as socially constructed and I believe that if you got two different groups of students and lecturers to write a report on the same concept they would very likely be different but both valid in their own way. Therefore I can see the great value in a tool like Eduzendium for opening up the definition of academic concepts and enabling the collection of multiple accounts, which can be accessed publicly. In my view this would make for a far more realistic but uncomfortable depiction of the nature of academic concepts and theories. On the other hand Eduzendium could be fighting a loosing battle if it plans to ‘collect’ ‘correct’ meanings and understandings of concepts.
On a similar note I also went to the WikiMedia session in the late afternoon where all the various offshoots of Wikipedia were presented, including a ‘Wikiversity’ that sounds very similar to Citizendium. The WikiMedia slogan is ‘Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge’. What does that say about the nature of knowledge? Humans can ‘freely share’ it? What about freely ‘creating’ it? I actually think that is what Wikipedia is all about and that is its strength. They should be advertising the fact that they are democratising knowledge. There is no need for them to reach for academic validity. Users can decide for themselves about how much trust they want to place in Wikipedia as a source of information. I have found that Wikipedia is a popular starting point for university students but there is little risk of it being misunderstood as academically valid on an equal level to peer reviewed papers.