WREG, channel 3 in Memphis, was the first to do reporting about WatchKnow. They covered the launch event which was held at the house of the project funder. Excellent positive coverage, we’re very happy about it!
UPDATE: another Memphis-area news source covered WatchKnow: “Web site a directory for learners, teachers alike” (Desoto Times Tribune)
The new site makes educational videos for kids ridiculously easy to find. We are launching with over 10,000 videos placed in over 2,000 categories, arranged in a very handy directory. The site is a new kind of wiki: working together, contributors can edit video information, and they can also edit the directory by drag and drop, which will make building the resource truly “wikiwiki” — fast. While the project is wide open and easy to get involved with (even anonymously), the project engages teachers to act as community moderators. It is non-profit and generously supported by an anonymous donor through the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi. See how to edit the site in this screencast video:
We decided to get the word out on the grassroots level — in other words, virally — before we do a press release in a couple days (maybe next week). So please, please, tweet about WatchKnow, blog about it, talk about it with your friends, etc. — and start working on the site! This is one Web 2.0 project that really has the potential to change the world in great ways, so it needs your support. If you love WatchKnow, say so and spread the word!
I thought I would link to this blog post from FT’s Richard Waters, which dramatically claims, to my surprise, that I am “ready to jump ship” from the wonderful Citizendium, which I continue to love, and which I would never intentionally harm. In fairness, I think Waters reported the main facts pretty much accurately and fairly. But I did have this to say in reply (comment #1):
Richard, “jump ship” carries the wrong connotations, however eye-catching it might be. A less dramatic and more accurate statement would be that I have reiterated — once again — to carry out my promise to step down as Editor-in-Chief after 2-3 years, to ensure that the project proceeds as a bona fide constitutional republic. This does not mean I will be “abandoning” the project. If I sincerely believed that my departure would mean the end of CZ, I would make sure I stayed on board in some keyed-down capacity.
I have not updated my personal website (larrysanger.org) for many months. I’ve been very nose-to-the-grindstone with WatchKnow.org. Once it is off the ground I plan to return to CZ to help a transitioning process.
As for the Wikipedia article about CZ, its coverage of the “issue” is inaccurate and biased, as I explained on the article’s talk page. There’s no “scoop” there. It’s actually very old news.
I should add that I apologize (again) to the CZ community for my recent silence. My excuse is that I am starting up yet another non-profit educational project, this time for preK-12 videos. Don’t look at it now…it’s about to undergo a big design and software change, and will probably be under wraps for several weeks as we lead up to a (hopefully!) big launch.
(And…uh…speaking of inaccuracies on the blogosphere…I am not Jewish. But I like and admire many Jews and support the right of Israel to exist. Also, if Jimmy Wales is Jewish, that is news to me.)
WatchKnow, our new project to collect and organize educational videos for kids, is now ready for “beta testing.” Check it out:
It works and it’s pretty nice, I think. Still, we haven’t officially launched. We are going to add a couple of essential tools, making it dead simple to contribute to, before we start announcing it widely and loudly. But you can feel free to pass this announcement around groups you’re in, and to friends and colleagues, if you like.
We’ve got a great way of organizing and displaying videos from all over the Internet as part of a single directory and interface. (Check out the “Browse Videos” tab and click the “Browse Videos” button.) It’s nonprofit, and open to everyone but moderated by educators.
By the way, in our “pre-contest,” the following video won a $500 prize: http://www.watchknow.org/Video.aspx?content=bf8c-93
Here’s a brand new video about WatchKnow from me: http://www.watchknow.org/Video.aspx?content=c2c6-142
–Larry (splitting my time between Citizendium and WatchKnow, working hard!)
The plan for WatchKnow has changed a bit, and things are happening now. So here is an update about the project. (Citizendium is a partner in this project, and I’m its director.)
(1) We won’t be hosting videos, but only aggregating and embedding them. Our vision now is to collect the best watchable media for children and embed it, organize it, and make it searchable from one place.
(2) We will be international and more open. Anybody will be able to participate, even if anonymous; anonymous submissions will be moderated, and we plan to launch in several languages, if we can at all. This is ambitious but doable, I think.
(3) Our distinguished Advisory Committee includes Chris Dede (Harvard), Bob Hoffman (San Diego State), Larry Lessig (Stanford and Creative Commons), Tom Pittman (Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi), Larry Sanger (Citizendium), Chareen Snelson (Boise State), and David Wiley (Brigham Young and opencontent.org). I’ll be inviting some others to join us as well.
(4) Advance Website has been hired to do the coding.
(5) We are on track to launch this fall.
(6) We now have a YouTube “pre-contest” going under new rules. This pre-contest will conclude Sept. 26. All contest entries must be Creative Commons licensed. To enter the contest, just join our YouTube group and add your video to the group! You can win up to $1000, depending on how many entries we receive.
Here’s a new video about WatchKnow, embedded in this blog:
(7) The watchknow.org website has been rewritten and made a little more user-friendly, and elaborates many of the above developments.
If you feel moved to help at all, what you might usefully do (other than collecting YouTube educational videos and participating in the contest) is help us create buzz about the project by mentioning it on your blog or website or whatever.
WatchKnow, the nascent free educational video project, has decided to let you choose the topics for our summer contest entries; prizes range from $25-$300 per winner. I’ve taken the opportunity to replace the earlier video with a shorter, better-produced version:
Here are the “open submission” rules and other details about the summer contest.
General project info is still at watchknow.org.
Please spread the word among your teacher and edtech friends!
We’re giving away over $1000 in prizes for educational videos this summer, as part of a WatchKnow “pre-contest.” Here’s a video I just uploaded to YouTube about it:
Here are the contest topics and rules.
Comments on the contest topics and rules still welcome.
Hello, any coders out there! Today, we spent many hundreds of dollars posting ads for the WatchKnow programmer position. Can you help get the word out? Can you post this in your networks or send it to friends?
Here’s a copy of the job ad…which I posted to craigslist San Francisco Bay Area, even though I’m located in central Ohio. The point is that I don’t really care where you live, as long as you can do the job. Being in the U.S. is probably a requirement, but beyond that, hey, telecommute from Alaska! It’s a 3-4 month contract job, and may work into permanent employment, and it will pay pretty well.
UPDATE (June 20): yay, we now have a good set of candidates to choose from…
We’re now starting to spread the word about a major new Citizendium program. This initial announcement is meant to be low-key (no press release yet). I wanted our “Citizens” to be the first to receive it.
WatchKnow will be a free, non-profit, K-12 educational video contest. It is currently under planning and development. See http://www.watchknow.org for a long FAQ.
Here’s the basic idea. Imagine tens of thousands of excellent short videos explaining nearly every topic taught in U.S. public schools. WatchKnow will be a free (open content), non-profit beta project, to launch probably this fall, to see whether we can create that. We will set the topics and invite teachers–and everyone–to submit videos. Videos will be rated, and, at a certain point, we’ll select a winner for each topic. We’ll pay the winner(s) within each topic a small prize(s), such as $75 and $25, but the amounts have not be decided firmly yet. We might award substantially more for certain topics. You could think of it as an American Idol for teachers, but we are not affiliated with American Idol. The project is being carried out as a new program of the Citizendium Foundation, with funding from a retired Memphis millionaire who wishes to benefit American education.
We hope to launch the beta project this fall. We will be spreading the word this summer, to attract school teachers and others to help staff the program in various ways. We hope within the next few weeks to hire a technical person to actually build the beta system. See the ad here.
For future updates, please add yourself to the announcement list. You can discuss the new program here on the CZ forums.
I have been asked to lead the program. So, you wonder, why have I agreed? First, the aforementioned Memphis philanthropist has been very generous in supporting the Citizendium, as an incentive to us to work on this project. (He doesn’t want to be named, by the way.) He has been very persistent for over a year in recruiting me (and us) to get this project started. Second, it is largely in keeping with our overall mission of bringing online communities together, to create reliable, free, and (broadly) educational content.
I suppose it’s often this way in life–you start out doing one thing, and you find yourself presented with excellent reasons to branch out into something else.
If you are worried that this means I’ll be quitting as Editor-in-Chief of the Citizendium soon, please don’t. I’ve in fact been working on both projects for several months now, spending *most* of my work time on CZ rather than WatchKnow. One exciting thing about this project, as an opportunity for us, is that, if it succeeds very well, it might bring large amounts of relatively “permanent” funding from a whole variety of sources. There will be no shortage of funds for a really useful free educational video project. As the parent project of WatchKnow, CZ naturally stands to benefit. Already, we can tap the WatchKnow engineer to serve a System Administration role for CZ as a whole. A successful beta project will no doubt provide us the funds to do something that I have been concerned that we wouldn’t be able to do: actually pay my successor a suitable salary!
Besides, once the system is off the ground, it should largely “run itself” and require relatively little work from me. If it doesn’t–if it requires heavy management–we’ll hire someone to do that.
CZ’s Executive Committee already knows about the project and has given our involvement their blessing. Several members have been rather enthusiastic about it. We have also received advice and help from a number of other people, including two “big names” in the world of free culture–but I will not release their names until the entire new WatchKnow Advisory Committee is constructed. We’ll be looking for interested and suitable members of that Committee–i.e., distinguished educators, ed tech gurus, and free content advocates.
I think WatchKnow will be good for CZ in another way. While we’ve been doing all right so far this year, we have not had a real “shot in the arm” in terms of the sort of announcements, press attention, and active recruitment efforts that punctuated our earlier months. WatchKnow will not only put CZ’s name back in the news, it will demonstrate that we are still very much active, expanding…and funded! Finally, think of this: the video project might end up being very high-profile. There’s reason to think it will; so far, everyone who hears about the idea loves it, and the idea is totally innovative and fills a gaping hole and need. If WatchKnow is very popular, it will help boost CZ, and vice-versa. So, in sum, I’m very comfortable with this as move strategically.
Again, here are the key links:
See: http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/713663956.html
Video programmer/system administrator (Columbus area and telecommute)
Reply to: sanger@citizendium.org
Date: 2008-06-09, 2:33PM EDT
JOB SUMMARY. The Citizendium Foundation (http://www.citizendium.org/), an operationally independent project of the non-profit Tides Center, is looking to hire one full-time contractor to perform two main jobs: (1) primarily, construction of an innovative online video system in something like the YouTube vein, and (2) part-time, on-the-side system administration of the Citizendium servers. The job will last from the project design, coding, and testing through a time-limited beta project, i.e., probably nine months at least, possibly to become permanent. You will be answering to the project director, Larry Sanger (http://www.larrysanger.org/), founder of the Citizendium and co-founder of Wikipedia, and working with a large variety of volunteers. You’ll work from home or from your office, but if you are in the central Ohio area, we’ll meet from time to time.
REQUIRED EXPERIENCE WITH:
* Set-up and/or management of online video systems, and the problems of such systems, including traffic and multiple file types. You will be coding up, or adapting, an open source video application virtually single-handedly. This is the top requirement.
* The technical implementation of Web 2.0-type and AJAX-type methods, and of course all languages and standards needed for such methods.
* User management systems/login systems/advanced identity management.
* Significant professional experience doing various Linux system administration tasks, including server configuration, e-mail administration, restarting the wiki server, etc.
* Independent work habits, willingness to work carefully to spec, extremely good ability to analyze English and discuss details of innovative projects. But note that we are very open to good ideas and will ask you to be creative.
Essentially, you must be able to prove that you have already successfully designed and implemented a video system similar to the one we’re asking you to build. If you haven’t, please don’t apply.
A DEFINITE PLUS FOR EXPERIENCE WITH:
* Documentation best practices.
* MediaWiki coding.
* Work (either as volunteer or as paid project manager) with open source and open content communities.
* Creation of videos/videocasting.
* Ed tech and state standards.
* Enough PostgreSQL to do simple commands.
Location in the central Ohio area is a strong plus, but we will seek elsewhere if the advantages are significant. We hope to hire and get started ASAP. In any case, the contractor will be required to give brief daily reports on progress.
WHY IS THIS AN INTERESTING OPPORTUNITY? This is a remarkable opportunity for the right person. This as-yet-unannounced open content video project and expert-led, real-name wiki encyclopedia project are or will be the first two of their kind. They are both currently directed by Larry Sanger. The video project is funded by a retired Memphis millionaire philanthropist, so you need not worry that funds for your work will dry up in the start-up period. This might well become a high-profile project with high name recognition. If the project succeeds and you do well, you will probably be invited into a more permanent (e.g., employee) relationship. Moreover, we will give you an opportunity to stretch as a professional, as the projects do or will make use of several first-time innovations (it’s not just a YouTube clone), and you will be invited to work with Sanger and others in the general design of the system. If the project succeeds, as we believe it will, there is a chance that it will pioneer an unusually compelling new model for online community content creation. It will also be very beneficial to society, as you will discover as you learn more about the project.
TO APPLY. To apply and/or make a bid, please send the resume of the person who will be doing the work, as well as links to samples online of that person’s work, rate/fee requirements, and date when available. Feel free to explain any weird stuff we might encounter when we google you. Since this is contract work, responses from individuals and from technical firms are both acceptable.
* Location: Columbus area and telecommute
* Compensation: commensurate with experience
* Telecommuting is ok.
* This is a contract job.
* This is at a non-profit organization.
* Principals only. Recruiters, please don’t contact this job poster.
* Please, no phone calls about this job!
* Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.
The Craigslist ad: http://columbus.craigslist.org/eng/713663956.html
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