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An interesting article appeared at Ars Technica yesterday:

A new salvo has been fired in the perennial war over Wikipedia’s accuracy. Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts.

The study involved a small pool of 55 graduate students divided into two groups (experts and non-experts), bringing into question the generalizability and validity of the findings. This follows, however, last year’s finding that Wikipedia matches the Encyclopedia Britannica in accuracy.

The evidence is mounting. Wikipedia is pretty darn good.

As part of their 50th anniversary, New Scientist published 50-year forecasts from over 70 scientists.

A couple highlights (mostly cut-and-pasted shamelessly from the above link):

• Francis Collins: Genetic advances will allow entire generations of us to live happily into our hundreds
• Edward O. Wilson: The biggest leap in biogeography and conservation biology will be the near-complete mapping of global biodiversity at the species level
• J. Richard Gott: Establishing a self-supporting colony on Mars would change world history - it wouldn’t even be “world” history any more
• Michael Gazzaniga: The next 50 years will focus on the social mind, the fact that humans are social animals and that most of the time we think about relationships
• Niles Eldredge: The most significant breakthroughs will come in the form of retro-fitting existing advances in molecular and biology to a more integrated synthesis of evolutionary theory
• Igor Aleksander: A scientific understanding of consciousness will come from a recognition of the brain as an informational machine
• David Deutsch: On the experimental side, the construction of a working, general-purpose quantum computer is what this emminent physicist hopes for
• Ray Kurzweil: By 2029 we will create computers that pass the Turing test, with formidable results
• Christof Koch: Machine-brain interfaces will be realised by 2056
• Gregory Chaitin: By 2056, weird astronomical observations may have led to radical new fundamental physics, and people will be tampering with the human genome, which should be fun
• Piet Hut: The discovery of life elsewhere in the universe would be the most significant breakthrough, not only for astrophysics, but also for biology, philosophy and culture

Technology Review has an interview with Danny Hills, cofounder of Thinking Machines. In the 1980’s the company sought to develop the world’s first real artificial intelligence. They failed. Why?

We look to our own minds and watch our patterns of conscious thought, reasoning, planning, and making analogies, and we think, “That’s thinking.” Actually, it’s just the tip of a very deep iceberg. When early AI researchers began, they assumed that hard problems were things like playing chess and passing calculus exams. That stuff turned out to be easy. But the types of thinking that seemed effortless, like recognizing a face or noticing what is important in a story, turned out to be very, very hard.

Read the entire interview…

I’m sure this has something to do with the future of education…

Join us for the next Horizon Forum meeting!

Tuesday, December 12, 12-3 p.m.

Room 303, Coffman Memorial Union
University of Minnesota, East Bank Campus
300 Washington Avenue, S.E. Minneapolis

Dr. Scott McLeod, Director of the University Council for Educational Administration Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), will discuss the skills that students need to survive and thrive in the digital future. Dr. McLeod will highlight disconnections between current schooling practices and future workforce needs and will emphasize leadership practices necessary to bridge the gap. Dr. McLeod also will focus on the policy, political, and organizational barriers that impede schools’ ability to be future-oriented.

Introduction by Dr. Chris Dede, Harvard University, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies

The Horizon Forum is a “mold breaking” round-table initiated by the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota to facilitate action-oriented discussions on how we may design outstanding educational futures for Minnesota.

Lunch and validated parking will be provided.

Please RSVP by December 5 to John Moravec, 612-625-3517 or moravec@umn.edu

Map to event: http://www.sua.umn.edu/reservations/directions/cmu_directions.php

Horizon Forum on the Web: http://www.education.umn.edu/cps/Horizon/

Two articles surfaced recently regarding Second Life.

First, CNN reports that over 60 educational organizations are using Second Life to explore how to promote learning in the virtual world. Whereas there is a concern that mainstay online education providers do not provide a sense of community or social interaction, virtual, three-dimensional online communities may fill the need:

John Lester, community and education manager at Linden Lab, the creator of “Second Life,” echoed that view. “There is a real human being behind every avatar — the people are very real. It’s just the medium is different,” he said.

Second, New Scientist reports that a flood of self-replicating objects in the online world have created a “grey goo” that overwhelmed the servers:

The trouble began with the appearance of a virtual gold rings in several areas of the virtual world. As users touched these rings, they starting replicating wildly and, eventually, the servers on which the game is hosted began creaking under the strain of the additional activity.

Virtual doomsday, anyone?

The Sloan Consortium of online education institutions released its fourth annual report on the state of online learning in the United States. The report series asks key questions in regard to the extent of adoption and acceptance of online education.

Among the findings:

• Online enrollment continues to grow, climbing to 3.2 million learners in 2006 (about a 40% increase)
• Most online learners are undergraduates, and are more likely to be students at Associates institutions (two-year colleges)
• Doctoral/Research institutions lead in online offerings
• 62% of academic leaders believe online learning is on par with or better than face-to-face learning
• Online student discipline, faculty acceptance, and faculty time commitments are seen as barriers to the widespread adoption of online education

Update: Inside Higher Ed and the State of Higher Education also have recaps of the report.

“hschmidt07” reflects on Dewey and wonders:

[...] how children should be educated in an unpredictable world, in an unending arena of expansion known as the age of information. The advent of this new face of society has evolving needs calling for many types of leadership. This is where I strongly agree with Dewey’s poignant statement that it is ‘impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions’. Unfortunately to say, I believe that the test-teaching and core curriculums used for teachers to keep their jobs and for schools to remain open, is in fact focusing almost primarily on just a few subjects compared to the wide world of democracy.

[...] Major structural change in education would do our information-and-subjects-rich world a great service to our society. The focus of this new model of education would follow in line with John Dewey’s insistence that the individual’s personality might be nurtured and trained, in hopes that curiosity and creativity will not be demolished by the current structure of the core curriculum used in all U.S. public education, from kindergarten-12th grades.

The Information Age, however, is already over. We are now in the Knowledge Age, maximizing what we know from information and new knowledge production; and, we are swiftly moving toward an age focused on the innovative and new contextual use of knowledge. Of course, 19th Century production line models of education need to be replaced. Human beings in knowledge and innovation societies cannot be educated as automatons with “download” forms of knowledge. They need to embraced and cultivated as creatives.

To this, I can only say: Long live Leapfrog!