Robert Horning kirjoitti 3.5.2007 kello 14:19:
I would have to disagree with both points above, to a
certain extent.
The point of trying to appeal to the interests of "employers" is to
provide an economically viable system for sustaining an effort like
Wikiversity without having to resort to advertising or constantly
having
donation pledge drives. While it is nice to live in a utopian society
where we can do things just because there is some positive social
value
to accomplish a given task, there are hard economic realities to
operating a site like Wikiversity that can't be ignored.
You are right. There are hard economic realities but I think we
should aim to find more creative solutions than simply copying or
adapting to the model of "selling degrees". Instead of this I would
look for private-public partnerships where the social and wider
economical value of the Wikiversity is seen so hight that the money
will come.
There have been several WMF projects in the past which
have used
direct
grants from various organizations (with for-profit companies as a
possibility) to help pay for various sub-projects. In educational
environments, it isn't unknown to even make a legitimate business case
to a for-profit corporation to provide educational experiences of some
sort within an educational institution. I think it would be
reasonable
to discuss under what sort of circumstances such a corporate
sponsorship
would be considered reasonable and what would otherwise be considered
"selling out".
I do not have anything against corporate sponsorship. However, I
would at first make an appeal to corporations' social responsibility.
As can be seen with the Essjay incident on Wikipedia,
an altruistic
attitude on this is not going to be sufficient here. Some legitimate
standards need to be established that go well beyond "yeah, I read
through the material on this topic, and played around with the tests".
How those standards are established is something of another thread and
discussion, but there is a real need for hard standards that can be
universally applied before somebody can claim to have completed a
Wikiversity curriculum study experience. Claims to have completed
something like this will have no value at all until you can
demonstrate
this knowledge and have that somehow certified.
I think ihn the Essjay incident there was not much to report.
Wikipedia is based on trust and tolerance and so should Wikiversity.
I do not see why in the Wikiversity there should be any "hard
standards that can be universally applied". We naturally must aim to
have "high standards" but they should be aimed to achieve with the
wiki community effort.
In Wikiversity there will be courses with different quality. We may
try to showcase those which the community considers to be high
quality and this way pull up those that are not that good. We could
also have some practice of "quality control" so that people who have
took some course could evaluate (vote?) whatever the course should be
included to some list of "high quality courses".
A course where you "read through the material on a topic, and play
around with the tests" should never make it to the list.
Mind you, this is the reason why a degree is valued.
It is a document
that demonstrates somebody has obtained a certain amount of knowledge,
and the educational institution who grants the degree is certifying
that
the person who holds the degree has in fact been examined to
possess the
knowledge represented by the degree. While there may be sometimes
professional certification exams as well (like a professional engineer
exam or a bar exam), quite often the degree is considered as
valuable if
not more so than the professional exam itself. Particularly when the
degree is from a prestigious institution who has made efforts to keep
their standards high.
Right. The aim of the Wikiversity should be "a prestigious
institution who has made efforts to keep their standards high". Only
this way the studies taken in the Wikiversity can be seen valuable.
While we may not call them "degrees" as
such, I don't see why
Wikiversity can't establish some sort of academic standard for
students
who wish to have their knowledge about a topic certified to some
extent. It doesn't have to (at the moment) be a full baccalaureate
program, but some sort of independently verifiable knowledge
mastery and
demonstration should be done other than somebody's personal claims on
their user page.
I think the "high standard course" (or whatever it should be called)
list will do this. If your course in your user page are all from the
list, good for you. If they are all some "read and click tests"
courses, clever people will get the point.
I also hope that eventually Wikiversity learning
experiences will also
be considered valuable enough that they will be mentioned on
CV/resumes. I would certainly look favorably at hiring individuals
who
have participated in a significant fashion with Wikimedia projects, if
only as a demonstration for how well they can get along with people
from
different cultures and philosophical backgrounds.
Exactly. I guess this is what we are practicing here right now.
- Teemu
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Teemu Leinonen
http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/
+358 50 351 6796
Media Lab
http://mlab.uiah.fi
University of Art and Design Helsinki
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