A couple of weeks ago, Lorene and I were fortunate enough to attend education.au's seminar with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. The seminar was called Challenging how knowledge is created and that's certainly what Wikipedia is all about. Early on in his presentation, Jimmy Wales spoke about the democratisation of information. With that kind of talk I thought we were onto something good, and the great ideas continued to flow: nurturing community, a culture of sharing, reappraisal of copyright, free access to information, developing resources in languages other than English ('monocultures are unhealthy'), and the whole free culture movement. The seminar was inspiring and rather than me waffling on, have a listen yourselves. There's a great program on Radio National (God bless the ABC) called BigIdeas and they aired a recording of Jimmy's talk. Here's a link to the podcast. education.au have also put some podcasts on their site.
When another presenter, Mark Pesce, spoke about how he understood what Wikipedia was all about, he did a content comparison between Britannica, Wikipedia and Uncyclopedia (a Wiki spoof). You HAVE to look up kangaroo in Uncyclopedia. It's just too funny.
There's so much to think about after listening to Jimmy Wales. I certainly need to spend more time playing with Wikipedia and wiki open source (of course!) software in general. Hmmm, I can feel a new gadget coming on!
Christopher Riley
1 comments:
I knew I'd forgotten something ... the Conservapedia entry for 'kangaroo': http://www.conservapedia.com/Kangaroo. Science students may like to read the 'origins' section.
Christopher Riley
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