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Brian Lamb raves about the awesome Murder, Madness, Mayhem project that was run by Jon Beasley Murray – where students in his course worked to create and edit pages in Wikipedia to bring them up to “Featured Article” status. Brian talks about how wikis are powerful examples of collaborative editing, and that although the students’ work is in the open, that any errors or omissions (or worse) would be fixed by the wikipedia community very quickly.

I finally decided to test this out. Not that I didn’t believe Brian – I did – but I wanted to put it to the test. Does this REALLY happen? How quickly? Even on relatively obscure pages?

So, while watching Brian’s awesome TTIX 2009 keynote, I pulled up the wikipedia page that he was talking about, and proceeded to make my own contribution to it.

Seems like a pretty good edit, to me. It looked official, and linked to 2 other (albeit nonexistent) pages on wikipedia. I know I enjoyed the performance of the Saskatoon Prairie Theatre.

Then, I monitored the page.

13 hours later, this happened:

Some anonymous person in Brazil noticed the edit, correctly decided that it wasn’t a valid contribution to the article, and yanked it from the published version of El Señor Presidente.

Is that something that can be generalized? Can all wikipedia pages be trusted? Probably not. But, knowing that a relatively obscure page was monitored and corrected in 13 hours gives me more confidence to trust the rest of the wikipedia collection of articles.

Here’s the presentation, with the clips and selections Brian and I used during the welcoming reception for the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference on Tuesday. I wound up not recording audio during the presentation, so you’ll just have to imagine witty and entertaining banter and intros for each video. Brian was responsible for both the witty and entertaining portions of the presentation.

The video selections came to 48 minutes. We were given a 45 minute slot after the welcome reception supper meal. You do the math…

[flv:http://www.darcynorman.net/video/CanadianELearningVideoParty_320_240.flv 320 240]

Here’s the playlist Brian and I used for our presentation during the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference welcome reception on Tuesday evening. I’ll try to compress a version of the presentation with our clip selections (we only showed short clips from many of the videos) but I won’t get a chance to do that until the weekend.

intro

1. who the hell are we, and what the hell are we doing there?
2. Brief riff on new abundance of online video and DIY creativity in era of YouTube
3. Intro clip of Guy Caballero, followed by SCTV’s Hinterland Who’s Who, followed by the Crack Spider version.
4. Overview of Online video awards

changing nature of education

1. Ken Robinson – TED Talks 2004
2. Spare Me My Life! Cultural values implicit in instruction

web 2.0

1. Doug Engelbart- The Demo
2. Apple’s Knowledge Navigator Video
3. Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
4. 2014 EPIC, by Google
5. Le Grand Content – information visualization

Hallucinatory Interlude:

1. Safe tripping…

creative commons and open content

1. Creative Commons – Wanna Work Together?
2. A Fair(y) Use Tale
3. The Future is Open

mashups

1. Rick Noblenski- Blasting Caps Expert and Wiki Advocate – an edu. reuse of old content
2. Winnie the Pooh meets Apocalypse Now
3. The Shining Recut
4. Monty Trek
5. Instructional Video: Mash-up made from instructional videos

I had a total blast hanging out working with Brian for the Canadian eLearning 2007 conference welcome reception entertainment gig we got coerced invited to do. Here’s the clip we put together as the intro segment for our Online Video Party redux, based on being in the spiritual home of the most inspired group of video comedians ever assembled: SCTV!

[flv:http://www.darcynorman.net/video/LiveFromDeadmonton2_320x240.flv 320 240]

That was re-edited and audio dubbed in a cookie-cutter “pub” in “Bourbon Street” at West Edmonton Mall. We could tell we were in “Bourbon Street” because of the authentic Celine Dion and Bryan Adams soundtrack, and the always impressive New Orleans wide selection of only the finest alcohols – Coors, Coors Lite, Bud and Bud Lite.

We took the vast majority of the videos from the video.learningparty.net site we used for the NMC Online Conference presentation of similar name. It was interesting – many of the videos work really well when viewing them by yourself, but really flop on their faces when viewed in a crowd on a big screen. And there were a couple videos that went the other way, too. Hard to predict what will work. We did manage to get at least a handful of edtechers to participate in a shared group video-induced hallucination, so that was a bonus

And, I got to play with Brian. That’s even worth spending a couple days in Deadmonchuck I’m still feeling the pain of letting Brian down. I forgot to bring The Hat, as I promised to do as part of my presentation garb. I tried to console him that it wasn’t an idle forgetting – The Hat was left at home, right beside Evan’s lifejacket that was to be used in the water park at West Edmonton Mall (we wound up renting a lifejacket for him, but I couldn’t find a Hat to rent in time…)

I’ll work on cleaning up the video playlist a bit and will share that somewhere. I might even compress down our edits and clip selections as shown to the conference folks. Unfortunately, I forgot to record the audio for the session, which may actually be a good thing…

Our session this morning went really well. I think we were able to walk the line between force-feeding the participants with the relentless firehose of super-cool social software stuff, and having a fun interactive session that served as a solid starting point for people wanting to play with Web 2.0™ toys.

The session was completely full, with Harry quietly jamming to the groovy vibes of Sesame Street. It was pretty cool having Harry in the session, and he was good enough to let Keira participate.

I think that Brian and I got into a pretty decent flow, and wound up demonstrating some cool apps and concepts, with participants doing as much hands-on activity as possible (tagging, blogging, playing with Flickr and Flickrlilli, etc…) SocialLearning.ca was used as a concrete example of social software, a tagging and blogging platform, and as a "client" app for a 3rd party tool (receiving photos from Flickr).

It was a blast, as always, riding on Brian's coat tails. I've got to find a way to invite him to UCalgary, assuming Keira is forgiving enough to let Brian keep travelling…