An expert Wikipedia?

Wired posted an article today on Google's latest new thing: Knol, a Wikipedia-alike with the twist that the articles are written by a single, named individual (presumably an expert) and subject only to expert moderation after that point. As an added wrinkle, if the author wants they can get ad revenue from their site if it gets hit often enough.

I have to admit I have no idea if this will go anywhere at all. If removes by far the best part of Wikipedia: that anyone can author or edit an article. This is the reason that Wikipedia has articles on virtually every topic you could ever want to read, often with copious references and a fairly decent stab at a neutral point of view. Get someone with some specialized knowledge on an obscure topic: bingo, another article!

If also removes by far the worst part of Wikipedia: that anyone can author or edit an article. The competence and neutrality of Wikipedia's editors have been challenged time and time again, as anyone who watches the Colbert Report will note. There has been a lot of discussion about the regression to mediocrity in Wikipedia articles written by true experts followed by tons of "helpful" edits by people who don't understand the topic anywhere near as well as they think.

Right now there don't seem to be a huge number of Knols (understandable since it just launched) and those that are there seem to be mostly health related. This is actually an area where other-than-Wikipedia web sites do fairly well- the featured Knol is on Type 1 Diabetes, which is great except that there are at least a dozen other sites out there with similar information. The others seem to be random bits like how to make pancakes- the areas where true experts could chime in (hard sciences especially) don't seem to be very populated.

Given that many modern student's first resort for research is Wikipedia, any additional site with quality information will be welcomed. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like Wikiepedia, which is often also the *last* place students look for research.

Google apps

I'm up at the CLAC conference right now and sat through a very interesting discussion led by Hope college, who ditched their old email system and went totally to Google apps.  A couple of the interesting takeaway points

• Google has detailed terms of use policies which go through privacy, data mining and email ownership issues.  They do *not* own the data or emails- that's up to the given organizations if the person or the college owns it.  They can potentially data mine, but won't report anything identifiable.  A couple of colleges have had counsel look over the contracts and they have no issues with the setup and don't think that it exposes them to any FERPA/HIPPA related issues.
  
• 6 month lead time for changes in policy, so you'll have a bit of warning if they decide to start charging.  Folks using it said they'd be willing to pay anyway- you go back to senior staff and talk about how much money you've already saved
• Search not sort: you have to train your faculty to not throw things away and not to bother sorting into folders.  Google can search them faster
• Delete in gmail really means delete- you *cannot* get it back under any circumstances.  This is by design due to privacy issues
• They can include campus-wide directories for emails
• Calendaring has grown organically at schools using it, to the point it's now the default calendaring system even if there are others available.
• They now have a blackberry connector.
• Gmail will *not* do mass email.  You need to keep some solution for alum and admissions to mass-email folks
• They want folks to move over to Google mail for alums as well- oh, that has ads...

With google docs available as well and all the issues around large scale saving of email (See our SAN issues) I won't be surprised to see more and more people moving to this.

So, how far do you outsource?

Back at my old job I had a server that was devoted to instructional tech- the LMS (Dokeos) ran on it and I also added a bunch of custom apps, mostly written in PHP/MySQL with an occasional bit of Flash thrown in. It was a handy place to host stuff like a Wiki that didn't really need a dedicated home as well as a place to experiment in.

I haven't had that at GBurg and I've sort of missed it. Where can I put little one-off apps, host a wiki, etc? (The Wiki in our LMS, Angel, is not exactly a biug win) But as time's gone on, I've begun to wonder if it's really necessary. Other people are happy to host stuff, and perhaps we really don't need to do much of anything much anymore.

After all, this Blog is hosted: I'm not using the blog tools in our LMS or installing a blog on a server. I ran a survey tool on a machine at my old job: when the company decided to stop free educational licensing I dumped it for an open source product, still hosted. Yet SurveyMonkey is just as good, works for a quick, small survey and if you really need a lot of stuff, it's cheaper than hosting a product yourself. We don't have a good Wiki on campus, but I just pointed a professor at Wikidot for a project they want to use. I could even outsource the entire development environment since I just got an invite to Google App Engine.

I'm not sure I'd want to host anything needing serious security- I've had people do surveys that fell squarely under HIPPA- but for a generic one off it's not so bad. I could worry about losing the company that runs the outsourced server, but in reality that's no worse than when we lost the survey tool at my old job: we still had to migrate all of the data anyway.

So how far do you go?