--- El mar, 23/11/10, Joe Corneli holtzermann17@gmail.com escribió:
De: Joe Corneli holtzermann17@gmail.com Asunto: [Wiki-research-l] my ph. d. -- still formulating a research question Para: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Fecha: martes, 23 de noviembre, 2010 14:16 So far, the best phrasing I've come up with is: "What stands in the way of building and supplying low-cost, high-quality mathematics education via the internet?"
The art of encyclopedia-building doesn't seem to carry over directly to education. This should be of fairly general concern (the Wikimedia Foundation's mission is about developing and disseminating educational content).
I think there's a knowledge gap in there, maybe more than one. It's much easier for me to think about "engineering solutions" than it is to precisely specify a research problem question!! In particular, I'm thinking about
Hi, Joe.
I'm not quite sure if I got your question correctly. It looks like you're mentioning below several goals that are somewhat connected, but at the same time different from the original Wikipedia goal (universal encyclopedia, freely accessible, that anyone can edit).
I offer some links of projects presented in the last Mozilla Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona, specifically to address some of these goals.
(a) building interactive textbooks that work for self-guided learners
Appart from Wikibooks, and Wikiversity, you have:
http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/ http://cnx.org/
And contents from OpenCourseWare (they're trying to create a comprehensive catalogue of OER to build up your own courses and textbooks).
(b) building technologies to support live tutorials over the web
That's the main goal of P2PU: http://p2pu.org/
(c) building infrastructure to help in developing good survey articles or similar content
Not sure if the new quality feedback initiative in Wikipedia falls in this category, at least partially.
The faculty here might want me to "pick one", but this is hard for me to do because I see each of these three approaches as being part of the puzzle. Asking how well one of them works in absence of the other is a bit like asking how well a fish can breathe in the absence of water.
So maybe the "research question" is about asking: What is the family resemblance of (a)-(c)? How do they work together as a system? Or maybe the question is about whether a given implementation of (a)-(c) shows any promise?
I can see WMF projects (Wikipedia, Commons, Wikiversity, Wikibooks...) acting as an important resource to fuel these initiatives. But I don't think the answer to the top-level question is to make just one system to address all these goals.
Instead, I think it's more natural that we have different projects interconnected to accomplish the global objective of having a rich ecosystem for OER.
Best, F.
I seem to be struggling to switch from a hacking-oriented way of thinking about things to a research-oriented way of thinking about things. I'd appreciate some feedback from those of you in a position to offer advice on these matters.
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