--- El mar, 23/11/10, Joe Corneli <holtzermann17(a)gmail.com> escribió:
De: Joe Corneli <holtzermann17(a)gmail.com>
Asunto: [Wiki-research-l] my ph. d. -- still formulating a research question
Para: wiki-research-l(a)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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