On 6/20/06, Jon thagudearbh@yahoo.co.uk wrote:

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.

Yes, well, this issue has been a long-standing one, about which absolutely no clarity has emerged. There was an initial vote to see which domain Daniel (Mav) would buy (see: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity/Old) - then the debate was reopened by Erik (Eloquence) (see: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikiversity#Wikiversity_.3D.3E_Wikisophi... and http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-May/003129.html). For me, the name does have its problems, but it seems to be still the best bet to energise a community of people to contribute to it. I also believe that we can explain a rationale for calling it Wikiversity while providing for all levels, on a page like Wikiversity:About. No name, it seems, is unproblematic (incidentally, wikilearning.org is already taken and active).

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.

Absolutely not - Wikiversity will not seek to undermine or dilute the effort or material on Wikibooks. Instead, I would see the material as potentially overlapping with eachother, but formatted differently - in textbook form on Wikibooks, and broken down into learning activities on Wikibooks, which could be used by teachers as stand-alone lessons. Some material will be duplicated, but the mission of Wikiversity is not to duplicate this material unnecessarily - indeed, to promote the development of further material on other projects if that is a more appropriate place for it.

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.

I think many of Michael's aims for Wikiversity are absolutely in line with what I and the rest of the Wikiversity subcommittee want. However, givenm that there are significantly diverse views about a topic as broad as education, it is extremely difficult to have a blueprint for a project which incorporates all these views. What we have tried to do on the Wikiversity subcommittee is to make a proposal that gives it the flexibility to develop with this diversity, while giving it a distinct identity from other projects. I anticipate there to be significant debate about where the project should go (as evidenced by the discussions thus far), but I feel this will only strengthen its development, rather than the other way around.

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.

Yes, understood. I personally think it will work for the following reasons: * It is such an engaging idea - to make multilingual learning resources available under a free licence * Wikis are making waves in the education world (as I have seen through working on the Wikimania program committee) - Wikiversity should be able to occupy a central role in bringing this community together * Wikimedia is a massive name in free-content resources - I believe that people with an interest in education will get involved because of this * One of Wikiversity's aims is to act as a spur for development of other Wikimedia projects - hopefully participants of other projects will be able to see the benefits that learning communities can bring to their own projects. * People like to help other people - many participants of Wikiversity helping other people to learn will probably be students and not necessarily professors/lecturers/teachers etc. This creates both challenges and opportunities - but in order to make it work, we will need to recognise and accept this. By providing a fully open space for peer-learning, a user-base is opened up, which, I believe, is unprecedented both in scale and scope.

Kind regards

Jon

Thanks,

Cormac

----- 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 _______________________________________________ Textbook-l mailing list Textbook-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/textbook-l

Erik Moeller wrote:

The important thing is that we form a network of free content platforms for collaboration among educators.

Interesting perspective. I think it is too narrow or inverted. The most interesting opportunity to me is to create the network of free content platforms accessible to the general population or "students".

In my view our entire society has structured itself around gatekeepers of all kinds enabled by information protection techniques ranging from secrecy to legal regulation to practical regulation.

There will inevitably be large changes which I view as beneficial and contributing to individual human rights and freedoms when there is sufficient free information floating around to reduce the impact of gatekeepers of all kinds on our societies and individuals.

The tricky question for me is what to do with how-tos. I think they do have a place in Wikimedia, and a separate project for them might be a good idea. This could include gaming walkthroughs -- instructional materials of any kind. But my biggest hope is for documents from the open source community to be migrated into the wiki context. There are thousands of FAQs, HOWTOs and man pages which are still maintained by single individuals. I made a small effort to change this with OpenFacts, but this was in 2002, when many of the relevant people were still convinced that the future was in using a strict workflow approach within a CMS.

I think How tos and other kinds of information have an obvious place in Wikiversity. In my view the range of useful information should be made more accessible by the existence of Wikiverisity. Theoretical electromagnetism as well as the "How-Tos" regarding installation and calibration of transformers that were deleted early from Wikipedia because it was "an encyclopedia" and appropriate only for summaries, not useful detailed information.

regards, lazyquasar

On 6/21/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:

If the WMF board was more inclined to approve new projects (not any old thing, but at least allow some new projects), I might be more encouraged to move the How-to guides to a new project.

I think if we work together, we can pull it off. The open question for me is: is it necessary? Do you think how-tos have a future on Wikibooks itself?

Erik

Erik Moeller wrote:

On 6/21/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:

...

If the WMF board was more inclined to approve new projects (not any old thing, but at least allow some new projects), I might be more encouraged to move the How-to guides to a new project.

I think if we work together, we can pull it off. The open question for me is: is it necessary? Do you think how-tos have a future on Wikibooks itself?

Erik

I am not really sure what the motivation is to remove how-to books from Wikibooks in the first place. The only real suggestion I've seen is to transwiki the content to Wikia, which is one of the reasons why I made comments about that earlier. I think perhaps in this case it might have been participants on the how-to wikia that wants to move the how-to activity from Wikibooks to their project, not any effort by Wikibooks contributors to remove this sort of content. The same sort of issue came up with the Blender 3D Wikibook, where it was apparently forked to another wiki with the admins of that other website asking that the content be removed from Wikibooks, and the ensuing discussions about wheither the content should simply be forked or if it was reasonable for non-Wikimedia websites to demand that content be removed from Wikibooks due to duplication of effort issues alone.

I, for one, don't want to see how-to books removed from Wikibooks. I think they definitely are instructional text that requires more than one page (much more than the 32K limit on Wikipedia) and can cover a topic with a NPOV and other general restrictions typical of all Wikimedia projects. This fits with Wikibooks more than any other current Wikimedia project, and any attempt to break off just the how-to books would put in a bunch of grey areas as to what really belongs on Wikibooks. Trying to come up with a definition that distinguishes between how-to books and general textbooks is going to be something that may require some divine intervention. I am also not completely convinced that Wikibooks should be exclusively textbooks, as other educational and instructional material can be developed by creative individuals using MediaWiki software. I have not seen a valid argument why Wikibooks should be exclusively textbooks-only, nor have any really good definitions as to what a textbook is or should be been agreed upon by most Wikibooks participants.

That textbooks should be a key component of Wikibooks, I would agree. And featured textbooks of high quality should be on the front page of Wikibooks. So where is the argument?

Jon wrote:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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