Stephen's Untold Stories

A very original and entertaining way of explaining how Wikis work.

Let’s just hope the enemy doesn’t get the password!

Join the Army, where you can edit all that you can edit.

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.

Read the rest here.

I would have to say that they certainly helped. Pretty impressive story.

Earlier last week, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from a Taliban prison. He had been a Taliban hostage for the last seven months, but the general public had absolutely no clue. In a joint effort by The New York Times and Wikipedia, the story was kept quiet until his daring escape.

In November 2008, Rohde was captured and held hostage by the Taliban, along with a local reporter, Tahir Ludin, and their driver, Asadullah Mangal. But until he managed to escape, most of the general public had absolutely no clue. To prevent Rohde’s value in the eyes of his captors from rising, the New York Times kept more than 35 major news organizations from reporting on the story. They believed that the publicity from reporting his capture would inflate the value of Rohde’s life, increasing the difficulty of negotiating for Rohde’s release. Keeping 35 news organizations quiet was actually not the hard part – but staving off Wikipedia users from publishing the news? That was a bit trickier.

Through an elaborate and ongoing battle between Wikipedia editors and an anonymous contributor from Florida, the New York Times and the Wikipedia Foundation managed to keep the story quiet. For seven months, Wikipedia editors were in a constant back-and-forth with this user to delete news of Rohde’s capture off of the site. They were unable to contact the user directly, as s/he was anonymously posting on Wikipedia, and thus could not explain to the user why they were trying to keep the news quiet. Infuriated, the user threw insults at the editors who were deleting his addition, and blindly continued their futile fight.

All of this ended when Rohde and Ludin managed to climb over a wall and escape the Taliban’s clenches. In an interesting twist, the driver chose to join the Taliban and thus stayed behind, according to Rohde. This is a truly inspiring story, and the efforts of the Wikipedia editors and the New York Times are beyond laudable. In a recent tweet, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that preventing the news from breaking may have saved his life. Regardless of the merits of this comment, it made Rohde’s escape more likely, and was a downright impressive feat of coordination by all parties involved.

Link to article.

We love them in education. It’s nice to see that the business world is finding good uses for them.

First appearing in 1995, the “wiki” approach to creating interactive and collaborative Web pages quickly became the star format for social networks, but too often business also-rans. Part of the problem comes from top-down managers uncomfortable with underlings making changes without authorization, and from stories of update wars on the most famous wiki, Wikipedia, the encyclopedia written by users. But successful corporate wikis abound, including SamePage from eTouch Systems.

Wiki is the Hawaiian word for fast, and wiki wiki is nonsensical, like saying “fast fast” or “run run.” The word sounds cute and friendly, another strike against the technology being accepted in the board room.

Yet what type of business is more serious and conservative than a boutique merchant banking firm, especially in today’s financial climate. Meet Armen Grigorian, a manager at Defoe Fournier and Company, merchant bankers since 1824. They didn’t have a wiki in 1824, but they have had one for more than two years, and Grigorian loves it.

“We needed a way for people to collaborate on projects. All our projects have at least six people involved,” said Grigorian. In a company of a dozen people, half the employees work together on each project. The problem is, those employees are scattered around, between headquarters in New York City, Atlanta, Rochester, Pittsburgh, and even Armenia.

Grigorian continues with a description that sounds like most small businesses. “There’s no real IT department or money to develop a custom application. We rely on typical tools for small businesses, like Excel and Word from Microsoft. We’re all finance and accounting people who can just barely use a computer.”

Defoe Fournier needs to keep all their working documents per project in a central place where everyone can get to them from anywhere, securely. SamePage makes it easy for Grigorian and his coworkers to organize their documents per project, keep track of documents as they change, and store files for finished projects so they’re out of the way yet still easily accessible.

“When we start a new project, I assign someone to start it, and I allocate the jobs and access to the project files,” said Grigorian. “We have pages for each project with discussions and notes. Sometimes we have live discussions by invitation, or people can comment later.”

Read the rest here.

Will Richardson echoes my sentiments exactly.

At the end of a presentation a few days ago with a couple of hundred pen and paper note taking attendees (and the odd laptop user sprinkled here and there) I answered a question about “What do we do now?” by saying “Well, first off, it’s a shame that the collective experience of the people in this room is about to walk off in two hundred different directions without any way to share and reflect on the thinking they’ve been doing all day. Next year, no paper.”

I don’t think most were excited.

It all reminds me of the time last year when I got to an event and the person in charge had copied, collated, stapled and distributed six paper pages that she had printed of my link-filled wiki online to 50 or so participants.

“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”

“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”

Um, no. You don’t.

Does anyone think most of the kids in our classes are going to be printing a bunch of paper in their grown up worlds? If you do, fine; keep servicing the Xerox machine. But if you don’t, which I hope is most of you, are you doing as much as you can to get off paper?

Read the rest here.

Wesley Fryer makes a great post that lists the best way to use this amazing piece of technology.

1. Connect with parents through publishing student work
2. Homework groups with kids (ask questions)
3. Share lesson plans with other teachers and links
4. In lieu of a faculty meeting
5. Write a new school song collaboratively, brainstorm ideas
6. Put websites for articles students need to read, and then discuss it together online
7. Post homework assignments and makeup work for absent students
8. Schedules and calendars
9. Collaborative projects with other classrooms in the US or outside
10. Book reviews!
11. Science journaling
12. Study guides for the test
13. Science fair presentations
14. Collaboration to plan fundraisers or other activities
15. Diary of a science experiment
16. Literature response podcasting or video publishing
17. Book talks
18. Literature circle
19. RSS feeds for kid friendly publishing (let parents subscribe to updates)
20. Posting projects

Here is the rest of his post.

Wikispaces has been my favorite educational Wiki, and now there is even more reason for you to give them a try.

Two and a half years ago we decided that all K-12 teachers should have advertising-free, private, unlimited use wikis for free. No fine print, no usage limits, no catches.

So far, it’s been a great success. We’ve given away over 100,000 free K-12 wikis used by over 535,000 educators and students!

As the 100,000 wiki mark has approached, people have been wondering whether there would be any K-12 wikis left. Well, we know better than to mess with a good thing. So today, we’re announcing our new commitment to K-12 education:

250,000 More K-12 Wikis
Like the first 100,000, all of our K-12 wikis feature all the benefits of our Plus service:

• full privacy, only the people you allow in can see your wiki
• no advertising, your online classroom will remain ad-free
• unlimited use, as many users, pages, edits, and files, as you like, no limits
• a customizable look and feel, so you can make it feel like home

Get yours here!!

All you teachers out there need to get on board with this if you’re considering using a Wiki.

• http://www.backtoschoolchallenge.com

Because everyone needs a Wiki (or two).

• 30+ Solutions to Start Your Own Wiki

Another great wiki video from the Common Craft group.

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Very well done!

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