Hi all,
I wasn't able to make it to the meeting this time (it was at
5AM here), but I'd like to chat with you about possibilities
for a Wikimedia/Wikiversity teamup with PlanetMath.org,
where I'm on the board of directors. PlanetMath content
has been used or cited in several hundreds of Wikipedia
articles,
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=planetmat…
I think there are a lot of interesting possibilities for a more
formal or structured collaboration, especially now that
Wikiversity is on the scene.
To begin to frame my own interests and possible areas of
involvement, here are a few slides I made for a talk I gave
here at the Open University (where I'm a phd student at the
Knowledge Media Institute), about "Crowdsourcing Education".
http://metameso.org/~joe/docs/crowdsourcing-continued.pdf
Towards the end of the slides, I suggest that an incremental
step (still a very big increment, at this point) would be to
create a for-credit class/course, e.g. something like Calculus
I, to be completed entirely online, e.g. via Wikiversity and/or
PlanetMath.
Another interesting idea along these lines would be to run a
face-to-face computing/mathematics course whose purpose
is "do something cool with PlanetMath" -- for example, help
develop the platform that would make it possible to run
semi-automated math courses (as in the previous paragraph),
or other courses for that matter.
To sum up, I think PlanetMath may be in a good position to
make a bid to become the "mathematics department" of
Wikiversity -- but we'll need to talk more about details!
Joe