Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Wordia - reinventing the dictionary

One word at a time, Michael Birch, former co-founder of Bebo, has been working on a new project to change the way we look at defining words. Wordia allows you and a host of rather entertaining and famous people to take the HarperCollins definition of the word and attach its meaning to you in the form of a quick YouTube-powered video.

Delightfully simple, potentially powerful, Birch and his co-producers understand the importance of a good story to find and remember the meaning of something new. Amongst my faves has to be Quentin Blake's deeper understanding than most of illustration. Top class.

20 Ideas For Local Authorities To Engage With Web 2.0

A week ago I spent a whole day leading a session on behalf of Socitm, the Society of Information Technology Management, where we were exploring the impact new media could have in Local Authorities and other public bodies. Most of those present were from the world of corporate IT and, as someone presenting a variety of tools they were likely to be blocking on their home patch, I was a tad nervous about taking them on this particular learning journey.

I needn't have been. Having explained in broad terms the main drivers of change thanks to this technology, I was able to explore some more specific examples of public sector engagement with the social web, from eduBuzz in the domain of education, to several health-related initiatives of the NHS. We saw how technology is taking politics towards the realm of direct democracy, and explored the potential for some of the mobile, ambient and participative media that citizens are increasingly using in their day-to-day (social) lives.

We worked through the afternoon seeking practical, do-able actions that these IT managers could take forward, without the need for engagement of the senior management teams or specialist outsourced expertise. They relished the task, and came up with some superb ideas they could implement in days, rather than months or years. Some of them have even put them into action already: take a peek at Stratford's homepage, complete with Twitter updates. Here are the rest, coming to a local council near you:
What are the biggest challenges in your organisation?

1. Competitions for art work on Flickr
2. Mental health blog
   1. Teachmeet-style therapy group
   2. Video diary of experiences
3. Flickr/Google Earth mashups
   1. Things to do in the area, events, locations for recycling etc...
   2. Online estate agency for social housing
   3. Statistics in a glance mashup
   4. Graffiti tracking, crowdsourcing for finding the source of the 'tag'
   5. Mashups to reveal extent of disruption during strikes, accidents
4. Crowdsourcing FAQs on a wiki
5. Homeworkers can have real-time advice between 'virtual desks' (RSS feed to mobile)
6. Twitter for mass-collaboration during crises and a blog to quickly publish information and provide an instant feedback loop
7. Longitudinal e-consultation on complex issues
8. Using Flickr to provide stock photography to local press and council workers (like this)
9. Providing digital cameras to council gardeners to share the process and final result with enthusiasts and ciizens.
10. Twitter private groups for quick intranet publishing
11. Watchlist introduction for the PO, PR, Comms team
12. Culture change through a "from-the-top" blog by the CEO
13. Suggestion box for cost-effectiveness

Meet my friend Noel: global explorer and NYC cabbie

When you've spent nearly a year traveling the world, to every continent, who wouldn't want to be a NYC cab driver?

Noel "noneck" Hidalgo is a bit of an enigma, and I was lucky enough to work with him earlier this year in the preparation for the LIFT08 Open Stage. At that point he had just come back from his On The Luck Of Seven project:

for seven months, he will traverse the seven continents, dive into the seven oceans, and attempt to visit the seven ancient wonders of the world.

He used a variety of social media to capture his adventures: video and audio podcasts, and amazing Flickr photo feed, a wiki to coordinate his travels, couchsurfing to coordinate his bed/sofa/floor arrangements, Dopplr to let his friends know he was coming, Twitter to keep his news up-to-date, and Facebook to pull it all together.

Well, he's at it again, life-blogging, filming and Flickring his weird and wonderful life as a newbie New York cab driver, from shaving off his fine mane of hair for the job, learning the ropes and taking the test, the hidden costs, and heading out for his first day in his first cab. You can listen to him interviewed on NPR's Bryant Park, too.

For me, it's a great example of the interest that's in everyone's daily lives, when you look carefully enough. Would your students know how to write interestingly about what might be considered 'mundane'? And why do companies still persist in telling me that most of their business is not 'of interest' to customers, and therefore not for blogging/filming/recording, when most people would have said that a taxi driver's life wasn't of interest to them when they were trying to get from A-Z?

Noel's just finished his first week on the job and is discovering just how much cabbies make - about $10 per hour. He's certainly changed my tipping patterns:

now the road journey begins. over the next few months, i will continue to push myself to do things i've never done - see things i would never dream - fulfill the promise made to family and friends from around the world - and figure out a way to worship the all mighty dollar in ways only a hard working capitalist can. "welcome to my cab. where would you like to go?"

Well, Noel, if you're able to pick me up from JFK on July 6th for the Empire, I'll bring the Leica... ;-)

Arthur C. Clarke - proud of his Wikipedia legacy or late to his own party?

Arthur C. Clarke passed away this week, and the activity on his Wikipedia page is something he would have been proud to see. All thanks and kudos to David Muir for the thinking that got me started on this blog post, which came from a chat we shared this week and his discovery of Clarke's death via Twitter.

What David noticed, and which has since astounded me, is the speed with which a holding message (pictured) advises readers of the page that information is likely to change quickly and be frequently updated for the next while, while the history of the page reads like a second-by-second data log. While alive, Clarke's wikipedia entry was edited at a rate of about three screens worth in six months (October to March). Since his death, edits have been occurring at a pace many times faster - nineteen screens worth in just two days.

This tells us a lot about sense of legacy, and about the unexpected nature of his death (newspaper journos with nothing better to do often get given obits to get back up-to-date in case something happens unexpectedly, hence the quick turnaround of most famous people in the inside pages).

But it also reveals how inaccurate and/or incomplete that page must have lain until his death. Just how much data has been landed there, edited, debated and finalised, all because, suddenly, there is more of an audience for the page than ever before, more of a prerogative to get it right once and for all? It's not filling me up with confidence on wikipedia entries unless, of course, the person I'm researching happens to be rather dead.

Of course, as John Naughton has pointed out, there can often be just as many inaccuracies post mortem as in life. Student researcher - and obit-writer - beware.

Atomic freebees - Google Docs training videos

The nice people at Atomic Learning are giving away their premium how-to videos on using Google Docs for learning, until May 1. These guys have plenty of Creative Commons how-to guides, really high quality step-by-step guides to using office, design, graphics and web applications, making it worth a dig around if you want to learn new ICT skills fast.

eduBuzz - 176th most popular wiki in the world

The guys from Wikio got in touch today having seen eduBuzz.org/support, the training and support wiki we created for teachers and learners in East Lothian Council in 2006, become the 176th most popular 'business' wiki in the world.

The wiki sums up a lot of the ethos of eduBuzz and the East Lothian Teaching and Learning Policy: openness, collaboration and the inclusion of all in the decision-making process. One of its highlights was the co-creation of safe-use guidelines for social media in the classroom by teachers, parents, students and managers over a two week period back in 2006.

eduBuzz isn't just the wiki, but a collaborative online space of over 1300 well over 1400 blog users and countless readers (1.3m page views per month) based on WPMU (see David's comment below about the problems of knowing the real, higher number of participants). While the online project was greatly enhanced by LTS funding some time and effort in an initial year-long period, this is a just another sign that the project goes from strength to strength in a sustainable fashion. Real community-building built on realworld tools.

Wikia and the Future of Search

Wikia is a separate organisation from Wikimedia, concentrating on how the conversations around content can help change the future of our web searches.

I heard about it this time last year and it didn't make much sense - too early, not enough there to see why it works. I wonder if, after hearing the boss speaking about it this time around, our joint examinations of Wikia this week might prove more fruitful.

Search results are already dominated by content from conversations: blogs, Flickr images, forums and, of course, Wikepedia. The problem is the sheer quantity of content. On a search for the Muppets, Wikipedia returns 300 pages.

If you're a die-hard fan of the Muppets, though, where is the best place to go? On Wikia, we can see 15,271 articles about the Muppets, created under a framework of fans in a separate "Muppet Wiki". Its Muppet fan founder says: "This is just the beginning". In World of Warcraft, the game's creators simply don't have the manpower and expertise to document the game, so under the framework of fans in Wikia they have found a way to keep things up-to-date.

It differs from Wikipedia in the human element that has been added: a social network. To take part you have to create a Facebook-like or LinkedIn-like profile, where other users assign you trust and see whether you really are a spammer or just occasionally wrong in your edits. This, in turn, helps search become more viable, helping to push the most well-written, most admired content to the fore, not through algorithms so much as through human beings.

Knives and restaurants

An anecdote from Jimmy Wales this morning:

Think of the last restaurant you went to. Did you have a knife on the table? Did you know that knives can do real harm if they are used to stab people? Have you seen our new restaurant? We keep each customer in his or her own cage, so that no harm under any circumstances can be done to others.

You wouldn't expect that, would you? We have common rules and consequences for stabbing each other in restaurants, and they work.

Why would you expect individual cages in your institution when it comes to using Wikipedia?

Pic: Wiseacre

The truth in numbers: creating communities

The Wikipedia Academies, set up in Africa and India and documented in a forthcoming Wikipedia film The Truth in Numbers, reveal some of the reasons behind the success of Wikipedia.

There are 280m speakers of Hindi yet only around 14,000 articles written in the language on Wikipedia. On a trip to an Indian slum, where parents have to create their own schools in the absence of any government services, Jimmy had thought perhaps it would be useful for more articles to be published in the local language, Hindi. However, the parents, who pay handsomely and go through hardship to send their children there, are desperate for their children to learn English, as this is the way out of the slum.

On the other hand, the 'father' of the Swahili version of Wikipedia saw it as an opportunity to start documenting the oral history of his country and culture. Until that point stories were deemed not to "be true" unless they were written down. He was able to hand that power to the people by kicking off the home-language Wikipedia.

And although the net is exploding, it remains a huge challenge to get the most basic connections into areas like this, and the challenge of hardware, poverty and connectivity remain the basics if we are ever to achieve freedom of information to all.

This is why Jimmy has travelled to these places, trying to find nodes, or 'fathers' and 'mothers', who can work day in and day out to create content, build community, take ownership of their pages. These five or ten people then go out, thinking about their own connections to find nodes, and help build expertise in editing and managing Wikipedia, and achieving something for the good of everyone in their communities.

Who would the potential 'mothers' or 'fathers' in your community be? Could you set up an 'Academy' to get these nodes working for the good of the community?

Related posts: The Red Cross of Information

The Red Cross of Information: Wikimedia

This is the first of several posts from Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales' keynote at Online Information Conference, London.

Charles Van Doren, in 1962, said: "The ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe."

About 40 years later it's costing about $1m last year, $2-3m this year, to run Wikimedia, a tiny financial drop in the ocean when you consider the impact that its encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has had: it's the 8th most popular site in the world (even in Iran, not the first country to come to mind for the freedom of its information, it comes in at 14). And the best thing: all of this comes from tiny donations, the biggest ones generally amounting to no more than $50-$100 from any one individual. Literally, little pieces loosely joined.

What is free access?
Free access is, in the sense outlined by Richard Stallman, based on four freedoms:

• freedom to copy
• freedom to modify
• freedom to redistribute
• freedom to redistribute modified versions

and all of this commercially or for the common good.

This all comes from the GNU FDL type licencing, yet most of the other 'free' culture movement platforms (like Flickr, for example) come under the Creative Commons scheme.

Soon, Wikipedia will be licenced under the as yet unpublished new GNU FDL licence, whereby Wikipedia can be relicenced under the Creative Commons Share and Sharealike scheme. This should mean an easier linkage between all these sources of 'free' information, and maybe make clearer the similarities, and distinctions, between what constitutes 'free'.