A number of comments:
1. If the aim is to provide multimedia learning materials for all age groups, not just university-level, then Wikiversity is a very bad name. Go for another one - Wikilearning, Wikicollege, Wikischool, something else. Just something which does not automatically imply that it is just for university-level learning. Otherwise, you will put off a lot of your target audience just with the name. Seriously. Give a dog a bad name... well, you know the rest.
2. Do bear in mind that Wikibooks does use multimedia already - at least in terms of audio files - and will wish to continue to do so. Some textbooks already have exercises and Q&As. If these can be made more dynamic on Wikibooks in the future, then I'm sure they will. Audio textbooks also, to my mind, fall within Wikibooks' domain. It's not clear to me whether the Wikiversity proposal seeks to dilute effort on these elements of textbooks, or not.
3. The aims Cormac lists for Wikiversity do not appear to agree with Michael Irwin's aims for Wikiversity. If the scope is not clear amongst the potential initial participants, it sure won't be clear amongst potential students.
4. Wikiversity seems very ambitious (more ambitious than Wikibooks, and Wikibooks, to date, has not yet delivered as much as we would wish). It's fair to ask - however noble the ideas- why you think they will work.
Kind regards
Jon
----- Original Message ---- From: Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@wikimedia.org; Wikimedia textbook discussion textbook-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, 19 June, 2006 1:10:41 PM Subject: [Textbook-l] Wikiversity
Dear all,
Wikiversity is a proposed Wikimedia project, based specifically around education and learning - the proposal to set up Wikiversity as a Wikimedia project is at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Modified_project_proposal. This proposal has been an attempt to address the fact that the last proposal (see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity) was not approved by the board (the background to this is summarised on the current proposal's page).
For the last three months or so, the proposal (which was already in development) has been extended and reworked by the Wikiversity subcommittee (see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity_subcommittee). The subcommittee is now pretty much satisfied that we have constructed a proposal and scope for the project which gives it the flexibility to develop, but also the clear rationale to exist as a separate project. I'm now in the process of negotiating this with the Special Projects Committee, hopefully to get it set up quite soon indeed :-).
In brief, the proposal is to: *Host multimedia learning materials for all levels (ie not just university) in all languages *Develop learning communities around these materials *Host research - possibly original research (though this will need to be discussed by its community)
There is more to the proposal and scope and, if you are interested, I would urge you to read the proposal and its related pages, which you can find through a navigational template at the top right of meta:Wikiversity pages. There is also a very basic mock-up of the front page of Wikiversity, geared towards the current proposal, at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikiversity/Example.
One of the things the board last recommended was that the community be "joyful" about the proposal before setting up Wikiversity. So, this post is to gauge just how joyful people are about the proposal, what you think works and what doesn't, what you would change, add, remove, etc. I would like to use this thread to discuss what the best way forward for Wikiversity would be, so we can give it the best start we can.
Yours,
Cormac Lawler (m:User:Cormaggio) (on behalf of the Wikiversity subcommittee)
PS: Please feel free to post this message (or a modification of it) at appropriate places - I'm just posting this initially to foundation-l and textbook-l (even though it slightly duplicates a discussion already underway at the latter). _______________________________________________ Textbook-l mailing list Textbook-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l