The first time I heard about Wikipedia, I got really excited; I characterized it as a “world mind”.

I saw it as a place to share knowledge that anyone (with an online connection)could contribute to and/or benefit from. I confess I was initially impatient with, and disparaging of, those who told students not to use it. As the conversation about Wikipedia developed, I moved into the “use it to start researching, but don’t cite it” for my students, and “It’s an amazing source; check it out” for my friends and acquaintances.

I stumbled across Jon Udell’s screencast which gave me an understanding of how Wikipedia works; I highly recommend you take the 9 minutes to view it

After watching Udell’s screencast, (or instead of, or before) read danah boyd‘s short take on the importance of Wikipedia – http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/06/27/knowledge_acces.html
I find myself in close agreement with her.

Wikipedia brings me great joy. I see it as a fantastic example of how knowledge can be distributed outside of elite institutions. I have watched stubs of articles turn into rich homes for information about all sorts of subjects. What I like most about Wikipedia is the self-recognition that it is always a work-in- progress. The encyclopedia that I had as a kid was a hand-me-down; it stated that one day we would go to the moon. Today, curious poor youth have access to information in an unprecedented way. It may not be perfect, but it is far better than a privilege-only model of access.

Remember Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s on First?” Here’s the digital version –
From Diva Marketing Blog, http://bloombergmarketing.blogs.com/bloomberg_marketing/2007/06/friday_fun.html thanks to A View From the Isle – http://blog.larixconsulting.com/blog

The scene: Costello calls to buy a computer from Abbot.

Abbott: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
Costello: Yes. I’m setting up an office in my den and I’m thinking about buying a computer.
Abbott: Mac?
Costello: No, the name’s Lou.
Abbott: Your computer?
Costello: I don’t own a computer. I want to buy one.
Abbott: Mac?
Costello: I told you, my name’s Lou.
Abbott: What about Windows?
Costello: Why? Will it get stuffy in here?
Abbott: Do you want a computer with Windows?
Costello: I don’t know. What will I see when I look at the windows?
Abbott: Wallpaper.
Costello: Never mind the windows. I need a computer and software.
Abbott: Software for Windows?
Costello: No. On the computer! I need something I can use to write proposals, track
expenses and run my business. What do you have?
Abbott: Office.
Costello: Yeah, for my office. Can you recommend anything?
Abbott: I just did.
Costello: You just did what?
Abbott: Recommend something.
Costello: You recommended something?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: For my office?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: OK, what did you recommend for my office?
Abbott: Office
Costello: Yes, for my office!
Abbott: I recommend Office with Windows.
Costello: I already have an office with windows! OK, let’s just say I’m sitting at
my computer and I want to type a proposal. What do I need?
Abbott: Word.
Costello: What word?
Abbott: Word in Office.
Costello: The only word in office is office.
Abbott: The Word in Office for Windows.
Costello: Which word in office for windows?
Abbott: The Word you get when you click the blue “W”.
Costello: I’m going to click your blue “w” if you don’t start with some straight
answers. What about financial bookkeeping? You have anything I can track
my money with?
Abbott: Money.
Costello: That’s right. What do you have?
Abbott: Money.
Costello: I need money to track my money?
Abbott: It comes bundled with your computer.
Costello: What’s bundled with my computer?
Abbott: Money.
Costello: Money comes with my computer?
Abbott: Yes. No extra charge.
Costello: I get a bundle of money with my computer? How much?
Abbott: One copy.
Costello: Isn’t it illegal to copy money?
Abbott: Microsoft gave us a license to copy Money.
Costello: They can give you a license to copy money?
Abbott: Why not? THEY OWN IT!
A few days later:
Abbott: Super Duper computer store. Can I help you?
Costello: How do I turn my computer off?
Abbott: Click on “START”

The video is comical but the advice is excellent! Don McMillan Stars

Link thanks to Donna Papacosta

There are still people who think Wikipedia isn’t reliable, that people should be warned away from it. I think it is an utterly amazing example of collaboration, the creation of an external collective mind.

The Denver Post got 5 experts to evaluate articles in their areas of expertise.

The results? Four out of five agreed their relevant Wikipedia entries are accurate, informative, comprehensive and a great resource for students or the merely curious.

The fifth scholar called his chosen entry “not very good,” found some details to be inaccurate by omission, and said similar entries in more accepted encyclopedias like Encarta do their job better.

http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_5786064

For more details, including the University of Colorado history professor William Wei’s negative comments, follow the link to the article.

Booth, Michael. “Grading Wikipedia.” Denver Post 30 Apr. 2007. 2 May 2007 .

Link courtesy of Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion

“Mobile Learning: The Next Step in Technology Mediated Learning” – http://tinyurl.com/3ckqlz – looks at both what learning is and how it might be changing as mobile devices become ever more common. The author of the article, Ellen Wagner, is the director of worldwide e-learning at Adobe Systems Inc. I recommend this brief but insightful article highly.

Courtesy of Stephen Downes – http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=39608 – I really like the quote he chose to highlight:

Learning is a deeply personal act, best facilitated by relevant, reliable and engaging experiences, yet many teaching approaches still rely on more impersonal ‘command and control’ models that include an instructor in charge, specific goals to be met and criteria to be mastered.

A comment that captures the complexity of education today.

For those who need a break from reading blogs – my Flickr account of being a tourist http://www.flickr.com/photos/shiftingsemiosis/sets/72157600030976263/

Well, my computer is as back to normal as I can get it. Some stuff was recovered, some was replaced, and some was lost forever.

What was Recovered
Many of my Word files were recovered, Not all; I keep discovering that something I know I had is missing. But, thanks to the service people at Canadian Computer on Speers in Oakville, I have much to be grateful for.

• most of my applications were recovered, so I have the work set-up I’m used to.
• many of my Word files were recovered but not the files from the course that I worked hardest on. I might be able to salvage some information from the histories of pages in the course wiki, but …
• my old poetry is gone and I only have some of it in hard copy.
• and there’s more that I will discover missing in the future, I suppose.

Some Replacements

• I’ve downloaded QuickImage again, so I can easily turn my screenshots into jpegs for uploading to Flickr
• I’ve downloaded Audacity and Lame so I can make MP3s
• I’m going to get my podcasts set up in iTunes again

Lost Forever

• my pictures. Some were in Flickr, but I use that mainly to provide images for my blogs. Many of my personal pictures are gone.
• As I mentioned earlier, much of my older poetry is gone, and much of my carefully collected and built course materials are gone.
• My Address Book and all my email files are gone

Lessons Learned

• Backup, backup, backup!!!
• At least for now, I’m forwarding all my email addresses to my gmail account, so I can store my addresses and the messages I save online.
• Using online services, like del.icio.us for bookmarking and Bloglines for collecting blog urls, is not just social, it’s a safety move. What I had online, I still have.

What I’ve Added

• I now have a 120 GB hard drive, bigger than the one that crashed.
• I now have a 640 MB RAM, much bigger than I used to have.

So I’ve learned a lot, more about the mechanics of computers, more about the wise use of my computer (did I mention you should backup your files?) and that my computer is my external brain, but that I can rebuild and repair it when accidents happen.

A Dark Note
I was going to add a photo of my computer that I had stored in Flickr, but Flickr appears to be closed down for now. Even online is not a complete safety net. Backup!

Well the people who worked on my crashed Mac iBook G4 returned it to me with most of my programs on it, but with small things missing, like the Spell Checker in Word. Not really such a small thing, as I type quickly and need the backup. There were, however, no documents pictures or other data!

When I went into Finder and found everything empty, I couldn’t believe it! I felt shaky. I started to enumerate all that I no longer had – pictures, and poetry, and saved pdf downloads, and all my documents from teaching materials to business records. I was not happy.

I called the people who had replaced my fried drive and I think I sounded quite pathetic as I begged them to see if there wasn’t at least some data. They asked if I had back-ups; I confessed to being stupid. They said they’d try again, but it would take a long time. The other option was to send the fried drive to a lab and pay a couple of thousand dollars. I said I’d wait to see what they could do, and not to send it to the lab (’cause no way was I paying $2000.00, even if I had been really, really stupid.)

I ignored documents and data for a couple of days, just doing web work, and re-configuring what I needed to do that. Then, when I was looking for something else, I discovered a cache of backups from 2004. (I’m really bad with organizing material objects – I’m much better at organizing files, – and I will get in the habit of backing them up!)

So I took my 2004 CDs, which I hadn’t made, but a technician had made them at the school where I worked when my assignment changed and I’d had to move from an IBM laptop to a Mac. (I wouldn’t want you to think I used to be smart; someone else had done it for me.)

By that time, I was grateful to have anything. I dragged the files that were still useful over onto my new hard drive and began to put my external brain together again. And began to face the idea of re-creating work I had already done and lost. (Stupid! Stupid! Stooped!)

Today, I rewrote a consulting report on a website, and I think I actually improved it because I changed the structure and made it problem – suggested solution, problem – suggested solution rather than the more traditional business structure with all the recommendations at the end. This structure will be easier, I think, for the website owner to understand & implement.

Then – a reward for the virtues of acceptance and rewriting – the people with my fried drive called and said they got some of the document files off it. Tomorrow, I find out what has been returned to me. And I promise, promise, promise to back-up daily!

When my computer crashed, I borrowed one. Those of my fellow web-addicts will still be cringing and crying out, “It’s not the same!” And that’s true. My own computer has all my files, plus an extensive collection of bookmarks on my Personal Toolbar, not to mention the mail application I’m used to.

So what am I doing writing a Blogger post? I’m writing to describe the backups I have, and the ones I will create when I get my computer back next week.

I write this blog for two kinds of readers, who may, in fact overlap. I write it for people learning how to use the web as part of their own personal learning, whether informal or education or job related. Second, I write this for teachers and students who want to use aspects of the web in their classrooms or for homework uses. (You can see the overlap!) So now the good news about what I am still able to (easily) do even on a borrowed computer.

• I can write this post. I searched for my blog title using Google and found it at the top of the list. I knew my user name and password, so I could log in and write. The same is true for my other blogs. They are easy to find, and all I need is Google and my registration info. Which brings me to some bad news about where I store my registrations, which I’ll get to later.

Breaking News
The phone just rang and I heard bad news from the computer repair guys. My hard drive is toast. Perhaps some of the data can be recovered, but I’ll need a new drive or a new machine. ARGHH!!!!!!!

I love my Mac iBook. It was the first laptop I owned, and the fifth computer, and second platform, I wrote my thesis on. It was loaded with all kinds of nice programs, and I used many of them. It was beautiful in appearance and operation! I don’t want to believe it’s dead, but the repair guys have been helpful and money-saving before, so I trust them. Arghh;-(

Back to the good news and I’ll get to the other bad news later.

• I’ve put a lot of my work on the web. So most of my (important) pictures are on Flickr, and a few of my word files are on Box (but not enough – I’ve been negligent about back-up. That’s the real bad news! I’ve been careless about backup and may have lost everything I haven’t backed up, and that’s a lot!) Sorry – back to the good news.
  
• All my blogs are safely up on the web.
• My wikis are safe on the web.
• My big bookmark collection, in del.icio.us, is safe on the web.
• My RSS collection is safe on the web, in Bloglines, – though I’ve been reading a lot of good things about Google Reader and thinking of transferring.
• I can get to my two conventional email accounts by using webmail, which I find visually unattractive and operationally limited and slow, but hey! I can get my mail, and my Gmail, already on the web, is safely there.
  
• And my most recent good move, which I thought I’d wasted time on and now find a lifesaver – I set up my own Google Account with my own personalized Google Homepage and filled it with widgets and links.
  

So my overall good news, is anything up on the web is safe and accessible.

My bad news is I have to get a new hard drive or laptop and I may have lost extensive data because I didn’t back up.

My (unsolicited) advice: Backup, backup and backup! And put as much as you can up on the web for easy retrieval.