http://knol.google.com

The basics

Knol is a Google-owned application that serves as a different kind of Wikipedia-style compendium of knowledge: “Knol makes it easy for you to write and share your knowledge with the world. “. There are well developed collaboration and sharing features, with a particularly useful rating and feedback system which would suit educational applications. Knol basically allows one or more people to construct a well-formatted webpage, with discussion tools and other interactive features, which, from the context of being part of Knol, is clearly meant to be a more considered, scholarly form of knowledge work.

Knol has not been as successful as Google might have hoped and is not widely used or known by most people. As a result it provides an excellent place for students to work with their teachers to create high-quality online knowledge resources, to become part of social knowledge.

Slides

Presenting the key affordances and possible uses of Knol:

Video

(There is no video for this tool) – instead, watch Google’s take on its own product

What is great

Knol is Google owned. As a result the technology works, and works well. It has fine-grain control over privacy and editing, which is very important for the easy work of distributed co-authorship. There are many good examples at the site which people can look at to see how it is done. Most of all, the context suits education: many of the knols already written are by scholars, the whole feel and sense of the site is to encourage considered, detailed writing and there is a natural audience for the finishe product. Knol is great for real-world knowledge production, without the need to establish websites, wikis or other ‘open’ spaces. Knol very much exemplifies the changing nature of knowledge work in a networked, collaborative and direct-publishing world: the quality of what appears there rests with the authors and not the intermediaries. Once this fact is grasped, students can be empowered to add constructively to the Internet’s storehouse of knowledge.

Have a look at Digital Millennium Copyright Act Explained , a good example of a knol, written by a lecturer in Ireland.

Scenarios for using this tool

Making ‘lectures’ different

Rather than presenting lectures, the unit controller in a third-year politics unit with 35 students, some studying online and some on campus provides summary treatment of 6 key topics via knol, writing up each (importing his existing lecture notes as the basis) and including references, links, additional matetrial and embedding activities to be performed by students. Each knol is gathered into a collection. This collection is them shared with all the students who have permissions to comment – the comments are linked, via the screen, directly to the presentation of material. Students are required to conduct activities and comment.

Knol:

• allows different roles for participants;
• involves both individual knols, and collections, enabling easy division of tasks by group or topic; and
• allows conversations about knowledge to occur, on screen, in the same space as the didactic presentation.

Student knowledge production

25 students studying human geography are divided into 5 teams of 5 students, tasked with creating a knol each as part of a collection on the specific focus of the unit (migration and sustainability). The unit controller creates the first knol, which maps out the key concepts and divides the field of research into five sub topics. Each of the teams is assigned one of those topics and, after introductory period on the unit, spend 4 weeks working out of class on their knol. Because the knol format does not easily ‘subdivide’ all students have to contribute to all components of the knol. The knols are kept private until each team is finished and then they are released. The unit controller then reads each one and provides a detailed commentary, in private, and a grade. Then all are released publicly and the students in the unit are required to review and rate each knol. All students rate each one; each group assigns one its members to review one of the other 4 knols. These knolls continue to be visible and useful. In the following year, the unit controller sets up a revised task, with different topics for students to write on, adding the knols that are created to the original collection.

Knol:

• has review and rating tools built in that make it very easy for peer feedback to be provided; and
• can be persistent over many years.

Authentic learning online

A unit controller uses a knol as the starting point for instructions about how to use web 2.0 applications in higher education as part of a fully online graduate certificate in higher education. The students spend the entire semester contributing content to the knol, and continue to use it, update it and link to it after they have finished. Essentially, the knol becomes a collaboratively authored, long-term resource. So as to keep the knol within manageable proportions, students also create their own websites which are linked to and from the knol. Because of the rich media features of knol, students are instructed that each one must include one screencast and one powerpoint presentation on a particular technology, with a link to more information and analysis. The assessment of the task is based on the presentation by students of their own website which contains the links to specific parts of the knol.

Knol:

• suits knowledge work that involves the Internet: it is highly authentic for some types of learning;
• is not a single place – it interlinks with any other kind of web development or publication enabling it to be a collective hub; and
• is public, when required, so as to attract a real audience to support students’ motivation and expression.

Alternatives

Further discussion and concepts

Google Knol: Wikipedia Killer or Scholarly Research Assassin: A useful reflection on Wikipedia, Knol and other online peer-reviewed knowledge sites, interestingly enough published on such a site (hubpages).

Demeure, V. et al. 2010. Assessment of e-learners’ temporal patterns in an online collaborative writing task. eLearn Center Research Paper Series.