New subject: Wikimania Pre-Conference day on reuse of VLE material

23 Jun 2014


      I'm new to this list, so hello all.
I'm writing in support of a proposal for a day-long event based around the
potential for reuse of Wikimedia UK Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It
is a Moodle site hosted at
http://moodle.wikimedia.org.uk/
and requires account creation (it is also in beta right now: you can apply
to Stevie Benton stevie.benton@wikimedia.org.uk if you'd like to help
review it - should be done by Wikimania).
What the proposed Education Pre-Conference day, either on 6th or 7th August
ahead of Wikimania, is intended to do is to concentrate on possible reuses
of the content. The text content, in rough form, is posted to ModuleWiki,
i.e.
https://modulewiki.wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Main_Page
so that there is an easy way to get a rough idea of the scope of the site.
There are also images, around 400 quiz questions, and a quite intense use
of resource links to English Wikipedia manual and FAQ pages. Content is all
CC-by-SA.
The intended focus on the day would be
(a) subsets useful for particular education and training to be identified,
copied out and modified;
(b) translations made and potential translations identified;
(c) Quiz material reused.
The page for the event is
https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Pre-Conference/VLE_conten...
which needs work, clearly: please bear with me as I have three proposals
arising from the weekend that need attention.
Let me explain more about (c). There is a tool authored by Magnus Manske
called Wikisoba:
http://tools.wmflabs.org/magnustools/wikisoba.html
and it is an elegant lightweight way to author quizzes, using wiki page
sections. The quiz material "locked up" in Moodle can certainly be reused
using this tool, via wiki pages, so that a quiz then exists in a link to
Wikimedia Labs. Example I showed yesterday at the "Future of Education
Workshop" related to the Wikimania venue:
http://tools.wmflabs.org/magnustools/wikisoba.html#module=User%3ACharles%20M...
Anyone, I claim, can learn the coding easily: that one is based on the
wikitext of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews/Barbican_quiz
which will be all the tutorial some people need. The 400 quiz questions on
the WMUK VLE can obviously be reused in other contexts, the Wikisoba tool
is fun to work with because you get quick results, and I hope we could get
quite a ways in this direction on the day.
Charles