Create. Share. Get noticed

Fancy being able to tell the grandkids that I was in San Francisco when Ourmedia.org launched! Well actually I'm in Ukiah to participate in a Train the Trainers workshop with the people from the Center for Digital Storytelling, but hey it's near enough!

I first learnt of the concept of Ourmedia.org when Jean Burgess had an academic orgasm. Jean asked quite sensibly: "Why is the production and consumption of digital stories, for example, so static and limited?" Stories are for telling and as he points out, too many people's digital stories languish on a CD or on a website somewhere, all but forgotten.

Enter Ourmedia.org; Jean was right to be excited:

…what excites me is not only the idea of a 'repository' of multiple genres of independent and amateur broadband content, where users and upload and download, and remake content at will, subject to Creative Commons licensing. This is a damn good idea.

But much more exciting to me are the hints of an intention to build communities of practice in and around the content…

Now much more than a hint, those communities will be built through the use of blogs, social forums, RSS, FOAF, tagging—all the usual social software suspects! So what are you waiting for? Sign up!

Update: Want to watch the latest digital stories posted to Ourmedia.org? Aggregate this feed. Other media feeds can be found here. Gotta love RSS!

I am the lizard king

Earlier this year Ian Grove-Stephensen, in explaining how the Wikipedia works, shared a reflection on knowledge production:

I went through school believing that knowledge was something that came exclusively from outside my personal universe. It came in textbooks and it came in encyclopaedias. It certainly did not come from me or anyone I knew.

Now, excited by the democratic and collaborative knowledge production opportunities wikis allow, Stephen Downes reports that Ian and colleague Steve Margetts have gone on to found the WikiTextbook project and are hoping to do for GCSE and A level textbooks what Wikipedia has done for encyclopaedias. (WikiTextbook follows in the footsteps of similar projects like OpenTextBook and Wikipedia's sister project Wikibook).

Ian and Steve's belief that students should be developing their netizenship by contributing to ventures like Wikipedia and WikiTextbook is affirmed by students like these (also via Stephen Downes) who are actively producing knowledge and strengthening community ties—a project that could have come straight from Chris Bigum's KPS agenda:

Working with local community, doing research that is valued by and valuable to local interests, the knowledge producing school takes seriously the task of preparing students for a world in which knowledge and its production are increasingly important.

I'm certain the Waterville Elementary School students have plenty to add to the Wikipedia entry on short-horned lizards?