On the next step beyond wikipedia

Students are routinely warned not to cite wikipedia as a source in their work. However, sometimes it is the quickest and easiest way to get an overview of a subject--if only one could drill down to its sources (some good pages do reference them, but many don't) and evaluate them. They are not as transient as a wikipedia page, and they can be cited (if authoritative enough).

That facility is on its way. A new site--still in beta--seems to have adapted a similar technology to that used in Turnitin (plagiarism detection software) to find phrases and sentences in a Wikipedia article which also appear elsewhere on the web, to highlight and show the resemblances in a pop-up window, and to display the source information as a link so you can go there and check it out. Amazing! Semantic search is effectively here.

The team have not yet incorporated all of Wikipedia, which it why it is still in beta, but it can only get more useful.



I have a few anxieties about what this might do to some desk research--it just pushes the issue of evaluation further back, in that you still have to evaluate the source material rather than the secondary wiki article, but you do still have to evaluate it.

It may encourage a student in a hurry simply to read (and even quote and attribute) a single sentence from a primary source and never read enough of it to get a useful overview, or appreciate the significance of that sentence within an overall argument or body of evidence.

But used with care, it has potential...

Thanks to Amy Cavender at ProfHacker for the tip--read her take at the link.

On dividing up groups (and other tools)

Being practical for once; a ProfHacker article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (a free US on-line magazine) drew my attention to Malcolm Sparrow's Excel-based tool for creating small groups from large classes taking into account several variables called the GRumbler.

It may be overkill given generally smaller class sizes in the UK even on undergraduate programmes, but nevertheless a useful tool.

And while I'm at it, here are a few more conceivably useful tools I have come across recently--and given that I am a skinflint, they're all free (for Windows--some may have Mac or even Linux versions, but I haven't checked):

• Teach history, politics, social admin? Then take a look at Dipity. It's an on-line tool to create interactive timelines. At the moment the demo. on the homepage concerns (of course) the history of Al-Qa'eda, but if you have a story to tell and it has been covered on the web, you can see how effective it may be.
• If you ever need to create screen-shots or screen-casts, then the simplest way has to be Jing, from Techsmith. It sits unobtrusively on your screen ready to grab static images or movies of whatever is going on, from any package. Only reservation; if configured to autorun at startup, it can slow down the boot process.
• Concept-mapping? When planning teaching, particularly out of one's direct speciality, it's sometimes difficult to relate concepts and ideas and items of information to each other, to see where they fit, and what other material may be important to mention... That is where C-Link comes in. It's another on-line tool: in its basic configuration you simply enter two terms which can be found in a particular knowledge repository (to begin with, Wikipedia serves very well)
• This is a Jing capture (saved as .swf) of C-Link at work (sorry the sound is fuzzy, but it doesn't add anything) It's almost an instant syllabus/book outline/essay generator.
• And this:
  
  
• ...is a concept-map exported from the site, and imported into C-Map Tools; which is a concept-mapping package (of course), also free and available from here. Concept-mapping is not the same as mind-mapping, as you can probably tell from the image. C-map Tools is a powerful package, incorporating its own presentation-authoring package--if you can find it--but not particularly friendly, and it insists on storing your files where it wants, not where you want. Nevertheless it does things others can't. (The image was once again captured by Jing in screenshot mode and slightly edited and cropped.)