[Foundation-l] Re: Wikiversity

Wed May 11 10:59:52 UTC 2005

>>
>
> I'm disinclined to agree with blanket statements like this, but the 
> biggest problem I see with your logic is that you seem to assume that 
> we have to model Wikisophia after traditional institutions if we 
> combine research and teaching under "one roof", and that researchers 
> also have to be teachers in such a framework.
>
> This is exactly the problem with the name "Wikiversity", it limits our 
> thinking to what is there, when we are trying to create something 
> fundamentally new. This is why I refuse to even use this name when 
> discussing the project. I am not talking about a "wiki-university" 
> here.

Well then, could you better describe this new thing that is not a 
university nor a research lab...

is it a café ? :)

wikicafé ? :D

> In fact, what I would like to do is to really get to the bottom of 
> these questions: What makes a good researcher? What makes a good 
> teacher? How can we improve and assess people's ability to teach, or 
> to research? How can we directly apply the latest results from 
> didactical and pedagogical research to the teaching processes? How can 
> we have meaningful feedback processes from learners to teachers to 
> researches, and the other way?
> Certainly, the process of communicating knowledge to a larger group of 
> people, whether in person or electronically, is always one which can 
> have creative and surprising outcomes. I want to build a model where 
> students can easily share ideas with people who are at the forefront 
> of research,

I told you, it's a café !!!! :D

wikicafé :)

> while being taught by those who have a proven ability to do so. We 
> have to separate the discussion about *role selection* from the 
> discussion about what roles should be allowed within a single project.
> Your analogy with "Current events" answers your own point: Research 
> can begin as a section of Wikisophia, we can experiment with it, and 
> we can assess how much sense it makes to develop this into its own 
> separate project.

Well the thing is that teachers won't really participate to such a 
project on the basis you suggest. Michel Foucault explained quite well 
that the only difference between a teacher and his students is that the 
students are evaluated by the teachers and nothing else, the only 
difference is that information is not share equally among them.

And the further you go in your studies, the more true it is. Max Weber 
wrote a whole book describing about the situation of PhD students in 
front of their teachers.

Is it a good or a bad thing ?

I don't know but trying to help students to better share ideas with 
teachers is nothing new. There has been plenty of experimentation about 
this in France...

But what you describe could be interesting amongst people who are 
already equals: researchers. So is it for researchers or for teachers, 
or for both ? What would it look like ?

>
> * Wikiquote's entire body of work consists of other people's words 
> offered as "free content"

"free content" is in no way a legal definition :)

> * Wikisource offers public domain content under the GFDL

you can't offer PD work under GFDL since GFDL is based on copyright...
>
> In the case of Wikinews, we had the foresight to know that neither the 
> copyleft principle nor the complicated GFDL would necessarily be 
> desirable, so we chose to put the content in the public domain,

which is not possible under many legislations in the world...

> The Wikimedia Commons was defined by me initially as a repository of 
> *free* content, with no exceptions for fair use or non-commercial use 
> content, and this decision, too, has proven to be very beneficial to 
> the project.

Still there are many legal issues with commons.

I know it since I deal with them every day on IRC... can I use this on 
commons ? could we put this ?

>
> The community that has arisen on the Commons is probably more aware of 
> copyright issues than any other, systematic tagging of all content has 
> always been part of its policies,

which is a VERY good thing !

>
> Just because copyright on these two projects is talked about a lot 
> doesn't mean that they have a lot of problems; in fact, it means that 
> they have been the busiest *solving* problems, while there's been 
> virtually no progress on the issues with our existing projects listed 
> above.

Well this is not an argument. There are copyright problems on each 
projects, solved by none of them. Commons is no better (and no worse) 
but it solved nothing and I don't see a lot of progress in it (except 
systematic tagging).