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

Tue Nov 8 13:20:20 UTC 2005

--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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. In short, not to become a 
> monopole others will fear, but to add our abilities and products to the 
> already existing set. To be seen as partners rather than competitors.
> 
> This suggest to me that the e-learning part of the project should be 
> dropped and that should rather focus on making the best material ever, 
> and set collaborations with other e-learning projects. If these projects 
> are set-up by wikipedians, so much the better probably. If they do not 
> put ads on their site, we might even become partners without editors 
> screaming :-)

I could not agree more. I’ve been to a couple conferences that were attended by
librarians and teachers. Each time I mentioned the possibility of Wikiversity
being a school unto itself I got a lot of negative feedback. I mean, who is
going to teach for free? Teaching is a multi-month effort that requires a lot
of daily time. But I got *very* positive responses when I described it as a
common resource for teachers and students at existing schools to develop and
use class material. There is a HUGE amount of needless duplicated effort in
creating things like lesson plans, quizzes, and other course material.
Wikiversity could help reduce a lot of wasted effort. 

So, pitching Wikiversity as a common resource is a non-threatening and neutral
way to go about this. This is the type of approach that IBM took with its
support of GNU/Linux; they could have put all their money and effort into
creating their own distribution, but instead they supported GNU/Linux in
general. Thus IBM was a largely neutral force and their effort was seen as a
big success for deploying IBM products for Linux and as helping the GNU/Linux
platform in general. Corel took the opposite route; they created their own
distribution and launched Word Perfect for Linux. Well, it would be better to
call it WordPerfect for Corel Linux since it was widely perceived as not
working very well with other distributions (to a certain extent, this was true,
but I think the perception was stronger than reality). The result: Corel Linux
and WordPerfect for Linux lost a lot of money and didn’t create any long term
benefits to GNU/Linux. If instead, they supported GNU/Linux in general, then I
think that WP for Linux would have had a much better chance to succeed. 

In short: We should launch Wikiversity as a neutral resource. The courses would
be developed to the point where a self learner could use them to learn entire
courses for free. That’s fine. Others will use the same courses while being
guided by a teacher from a school that is not affiliated with Wikimedia. That
student will get credit from that school – not from us. If and when there is
ever a big push to start an actual school, then those people would be more than
welcome to start their own school. But it should not be part of Wikimedia. We
should remain neutral. 

-- mav

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