[Foundation-l] Re: Vote to create Wikiversity 2 sides

Tue Nov 8 09:26:01 UTC 2005

In response to the idea that Wikiversity as a learning community might
compete with, or preclude partnerships with, existing educational
projects :

What impresses me most about Wikimedia is not the growing content
repository, but the growing body of knowledge-seekers who write to,
teach and learn from one another, all about and through free
knowledge.  A large community of people with whom I can geek out about
best practices for writing bios on forgotten mathematicians, or the
kind of information to include in the history of a hurricane season,
or how to distinguish languages from dialects, or how to distinguish
environmental science from environmental politics.

Wikipedia is *already* a teaching and learning community.  It is not a
community of savants who fit in a few hours of transcription and
writing into their weeks.  One of its regular services is facilitating
the teaching of passionate people how to become better writers, how to
remove bias from their observations, how to argue logically with
others, how to produce quality translations.

I imagine that a Wikiversity would be founded in teaching without
teachers, and certainly without thought given to accreditation of
either instructors or degrees -- but instead founded in
 a) identifying fields, courses, and syllabi
 b) gathering up free texts, cheatsheets, problem sets, exams, and
other materials
 c) facilitating groups of interested students -- at many levels of
knowledge and teaching experience -- who want to learn together, form
study and reading groups, and teach one another.
 d) bringing together interested educators and related programs
worldwide, to contribute ideas and content, try out new teaching
methods via wikis, and more.

Adding new software functionality, while always a lovely thing to do
(software can do anything, after all :) could come after everything
else on this list.

This would not be "e-learning" in the trademarked (sic) sense.  This
would be unlike every big online educational project to date.  For one
thing, it would naturally scale without assigned 'staff' and related
overhead.  For another, I know educators who dearly hope to see
someone try out this such a student-to-student learning project; and I
know of no major initiatives with which such a project would compete
(if they exist, I would love to learn of them!).

++SJ

>> Cormac writes:
> >>I think you're raising some interesting points here - I think what's
> >>emerging for me is that some people are quite nervous about
> >>Wikiversity being a Wikimedia project - if it aspires to be an
> >>e-learning resource. I don't personally see the problem, as long as we
> >>start small, stay realistic and grow from there, but it is clear that
> >>more thinking (and probably research) needs to be done. This should be
> >>collated on Meta, probably on a new page like
> >>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Moving_Wikiversity_forward - please
> >>feel free to add any ideas to related pages. I think at this stage we
> >>need practical proposals, but also practical questions.

> Anthony writes:
> > Maybe a more narrow focus to start out would alleviate some of the concern.
> > From the project page there are two parts to the project, creating teaching
> > materials and then using them to teach. The first fits a lot better in with
> > Wikimedia...  The actual teaching part, I think can wait, but if there are a few people
> > really dedicated to making it happen they should get together and start
> > doing it, Wikimedia project or not.

Anthere adds:
> It seems to me the first part is pretty uncontroversial... though some
> people seem to consider it could entirely fit under wikibooks (the main
> problem being that many wikibooks do not agree with this).
<
> The second part, the e-learning platform (ie, making possible to follow
> on-line courses, whith the collection of issues such as "credential of
> teachers", "diplomas" etc...) is highly controversial. It will directly
> compete with schools and universities (while making e-teaching material
> is likely to get teachers involved very much and likely to set up
> collaborations with schools). It will meet full face with the fact not
> all countries rely on the same educational organisation. It will stale
> in face of "diplomas" granting.
<
> I believe we should not try to "replace" what currently exist, but we
> should rather seek to provide information or other formats of
> information to "enrich" what already exist.