As described on Wikipedia, “A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems. “

Here is an example of a great wiki created by a school in Camilla, Georgia.

For more information on the different kinds of wikis available, go here.

From the website:

“Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.

The selection of Project Gutenberg ETexts:

There are three portions of the Project Gutenberg Library, basically be described as:

Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop’s Fables, etc.

Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.

References; such as Roget’s Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.

The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etexts to Peter Pan when they come back from watching HOOK at the movies, or when they read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Khan; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to Through the Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries.

We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy to find etext format.

With Plain Vanilla ASCII you will be easily able to search an entire library, without any program more sophisticated than a plain search program. In fact, these Project Gutenberg Etext files are so plain that you can do a search on them without even using an intermediate search program (i.e. a program between you and the disk) Norton’s and other direct disk access programs can search every one of your files without you even naming them, pointing to an etext directory, or whatever. You can simply search a raw output from the disk …”

Anki Flashcard Software

Kids today spend a lot of time on the phone, talking, texting, and accessing the world’s information.  While they are skilled at communicating with new technologies, schools are slow to integrate them into their educational programs.  For a few years now, I have been wondering how to integrate learning into hand held devices, such as cell phones.  Anki makes it possible.  I’ll call it Cellulearning.  Without a doubt, students of the future will be able to hold an entire year’s worth of learning in the palm of their hand. 

Anki is another spaced repetition flashcard system, but in some ways it is easier to use than Mnemosyne because you can access it online and you are not required to download and install it on your computer.  You can get started right away though the Anki web-based application, building flash card packs and accessing them with an internet-ready hand held device or a computer.  Anki is popular in Asia, and it’s only a matter of time until U.S. kids are “dialed in” to their Anki packs on the bus to school.  Schools across the U.S. should be developing grade-level content mastery and high school exit exam flash card study packs.

From the Anki website: Anki is a program designed to help you remember facts (such as words and phrases in a foreign language) as easily, quickly and efficiently as possible. To do this, it tracks how well you remember each fact, and uses that information to optimally schedule review times. With a minimal amount of effort, you can greatly increase the amount of material you remember, making study more productive, and more fun.

Anki is based on a theory called spaced repetition. In simple terms, it means that each time you review some material, you should wait longer than last time before reviewing it again. This maximizes the time spent studying difficult material and minimizes the time spent reviewing things you already know. The concept is simple, but the vast majority of memory trainers and flashcard programs out there either avoid the concept all together, or implement inflexible and suboptimal methods that were originally designed for pen and paper.

From here, you can:

• Learn more about spaced repetition and the importance of review.
• Look at some screenshots of Anki.
• Download Anki and start improving your memory

I’ve been using Moodle for two years, developing online learning communities for schools.  In addition to creating virtual classrooms, where teachers can provide extended learning opportunities to students, I build online Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), helping schools deliver ongoing professional development and create web-based environments where teachers and administrators have the flexibility to exchange information, communicate, and collaborate when it’s convenient for them.

One of the biggest challenges facing schools involves getting teachers together to discuss curriculum, instruction, and discipline.  There is never enough time to discuss all the issues.  Topics that are discussed sometimes get grazed over.  In online PLCs, however, teachers can collaborate when it’s convenient for them.  If someone needs help creating an assessment, a forum posting can be sent out to one’s peers to solicit feedback.  If a teacher is having a hard time with a student or a group of students, a quick instant message heads up will inform colleagues of the situation before too much time has elapsed.

In many school districts, due to union mandates, principals do not have that much latitude when it comes to choosing when, where, and how to conduct faculty meetings.  Larger schools, of course, do not have full faculty meetings that often, but weekly department meetings take their place.  While online learning communities will never replace the need for face-to-face dialogue between teachers, they provide schools  with the flexibility they need to help teachers communicate and collaborate.

A friend of mine I met at an educational technology start up in San Francisco quit his job a few years ago and sailed across the world, alone, to Southeast Asia.  Recently, he told me about this great open source application called Mnemosyne, which he is using to learn Chinese.  The  Mnemosyne Project has has developed a highly effective spaced learning system, which is essentially a high tech spin on the good ol’ flash card learning system.  I can see this application playing a valuable role in education for three main reasons:

• It’s research based and scientifically proven to improve learning
• Much of education involves route memorization
• It’s open source (freely available)

From the Mnemosyne Website: The Mnemosyne Project has two aspects:

• It’s a sophisticated free flash-card tool which optimizes your learning process.
• It’s a research project into the nature of long-term memory.

Efficient learning: The Mnemosyne software resembles a traditional flash-card program to help you memorize question/answer pairs, but with an important twist: it uses a sophisticated algorithm to schedule the best time for a card to come up for review. Difficult cards that you tend to forget quickly will be scheduled more often, while Mnemosyne won’t waste your time on things you remember well. The software runs on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

Memory research: While you use the software, detailed statistics can be kept on your learning process. If you want, these logs can be uploaded in a transparent and anonymous way to a central server for analysis.

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