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

Tue Nov 8 13:24:12 UTC 2005

On 11/8/05, Anthony DiPierro <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> On 11/8/05, SJ <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 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
>
>
> You say that "Wikipedia is *already* a teaching and learning community." And
> you're right, it is. But I think it's significant that the community isn't
> the purpose of the project, building an encyclopedia is.
>
> Likewise, I believe if a project is started to create e-learning materials,
> I think it's natural that some people will use that project to organize
> self-study courses and maybe even to discuss more traditional courses. I
> don't think we should stop them, and the organization of self-study courses
> pretty much falls under the creation of e-learning materials anyway.
>
> In fact, if essentially what you just wrote was what was on the project page
> when I read it, I would have gotten a completely different picture of what
> the project was. Looking back I see it in parts of the description. I wonder
> if maybe the name of the project could be reconsidered to better portray
> this goal. That would have pros and cons, though.
>
> Anyway, if votes still matter, you can count mine as a yes I guess.
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Aarggh!

why do I never have time to respond to the things i'm most interested
in? This thread is right up my street - pressing all my buttons :-)

I've set up that page I mentioned at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Moving_Wikiversity_forward

This is to try to see what is realistic for wikiversity to be now and
what it needs to develop it into the future. Ideas, thoughts, research
proposals..

Cormac