Jon wrote:
A number of comments:
- 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.
We do not necessarily want a lot of kids to show up by themselves with no supervision from parents, teachers or other adults. Wikiversity captures the essence of a University which is provide a place where scholars and students and participants of all kinds get together to collaborate on the exchange of knowledge. A high school in the U.S. focuses competition and keeping the kids from working together too much to make evaluation of each child or student's progress easy. I suppose one could capture this competitive model with a wiki but it seems an outmoded approach whe the internet is proving that collaboration between widely separated people physcially scattered across the planet can excel and even begin to supercede individual efforts.
- 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.
The Wikiversity proposal seeks to dilute nothing already in progress in other projects. Rather provide a workspace where participants not quite ready to provide top notch outstanding materials for the other projects can work. If the combined efforts of Wikiversity's participants start to produce excellent materials for the other wiki projects, the materials can be forked or transwiki'ed and linked to as appropriate for maintenance for serving to the general public. Wikibooks does not necessarily want aggressive students or participants changing their best material without a reasonable time delay and validation of the new material. Wikiversity allow a workspace where less capable participants just learning the material can make their tweaks and have lengthy discussions without distracting higher level authors or the public from the already existing excellent material deemed worthy to be served to the general public.
- 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.
The scope is as clear as it can hope to be without some participants trying a few things and finding out what works. There has been substantial discussion and several approaches identified with varying levels of support from various people kind enough or interested in the the project to donate their time commenting on what they think will work or is or is not a good idea. In my view you are absolutely correct. There will be substantial discussion and trial and error amongth the initial participants as a common vision of Wikiversity that is satisfactory to the rest of Wikimedia Community and attractive enough to new participants to thrive and grow.
Cormac and I disagree primarily on initial tactics to initialize the project efficiently. I think we both agree substantially in our vision of what a Wikiversity might become. The question of how to attract sufficient participation to achieve a critical mass where anyone who drops in or hears about Wikiversity understands intuitively how they can benefit from the project while productively contributing to a project that will substantially impact the future of the internet and thus the human species.
- 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
I think Wikiversity will work and augment at least Wikipedia and Wikibooks substantially because in the front of every hundred dollar physics, engineering, computer science, technical writing or poetry textbook I have ever purchase there is a substantial forward or credits page detailing the authors appreciation of the cast of hundreds if not thousands of assistants, editors, users, etc. who have contributed in some significant way to improving the draft version or previous edition of the book. As we lay out learning materials or learning trails or learning activities at Wikiversity we will naturally be routing interested traffic through useful materials at Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikibooks as well as other potentially useful sites around the internet. All of the Wiki communities are setup to capture and thrive on diffuse input from casual users as well as higher level busy experts who wander by with comments. I see Wikiversity as a way to encourage larger volumes of Wiki users at all levels from the internet accessible people around the planet who are interested in specific learning communities but not so dedicated as to tackle an entire high quality encyclopedia article or textbook.
Further, a static high quality data product can become intimidating and inaccessible to new users whereas an entire learning community or group will include people at all levels who can help each other understand difficult concepts poorly expressed in the current top level material or help each other find appropriate level material expressed via an appropriate paradigm to match the participant having difficulties.
Thanks for your interest and queries regarding Wikiversity.
regards, lazyquasar