Hi Scott,
I'm personally very interested in the future of online education, and I appreciate your enthusiasm about the subject. However, I wonder if your energy would be more productive if it was directed to an older project. Have you heard of Wikiversity? It is already multilingual and doesn't have advertisements from hosting on Wikia. However, even though I knew about Wikiversity when I was still in high school, I've actually been surprised at how little I've used it over the years. I think it is trying to solve a problem that I never encountered. I think learning is one of the easiest things to do on the internet, and it has been even easier in the post-Wikipedia era now that so much of the most important information has been well summarized, consistently formatted, and heavily linked. If I check my YouTube subscriptions right now, I get free, full-length lectures in my feed from Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Yale, UCLA, Technion, UPenn, IIT Bangalore, and Cornell. I remember when MIT OpenCourseWare first came out, and it's been incredible to see how e-learning has flourished since then. I have over a hundred YouTube channels that are primarily educational. My needs are met if I know what I'm looking for or if I just want to be surprised by some current, stimulating educational content. The software library initiative we have been discussing in this thread would be a hybrid of a wiki and a regular source control system typically used in open source projects. Like I said, I can still think of several reasons why it might not work, but I keep finding myself thinking a few times every week that maybe we should try.
Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 17:58:38 -0700
From:
worlduniversityandschool@gmail.comTo:
wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikidata-l] Accelerating software innovation with Wikidata and improved Wikicode
Hi Michael and Wikidatans,
see the WUaS Computer Science wiki subject page for this and related links -
WUaS, which is like Wikipedia with MIT OCW, plans to develop in all 7,105+ languages and 204+ countries, - for open, wiki teaching and learning, in addition to free, C.C., MIT OCW-centric, university degrees, beginning in the U.N. languages after English - so not only will this extensible WUaS Software Libraries find form in all languages and countries, but WUaS's plans to move to Wikidata will make this a database. MIT-centric WUaS students will eventually add to, and develop, these libraries greatly I suspect.
Best regards,
Scott
On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Michael Hale
<hale.michael.jr@live.com> wrote:
I completely agree that wiki-projects are exemplary organic growth models compared to the way plans are made by Congress. I certainly support using information technology to move governments toward more direct and efficient forms of democracy. I would love to see things like income tax levels determined in real-time based on the average preferences of everyone's e-government web preferences. Many people still don't have internet access though. I think when a person comes up with a plan they typically consider 2 or 3 factors in a qualitative manner in their mental model of the system and disregard other side effects as insignificant. That paper used a model with 10 or so factors in a quantitative manner. There are many things it leaves out, but such plans are still useful as counterweights in policy arguments against ideas that are extreme in other directions. Regardless, a person couldn't design by hand the circuit layout of the processors that are currently in our computers and phones, and the number of problems that are too big for our brains that computers are helping us with is expanding. If we had a way to design computational models in a wiki manner then we could just add the irrigation and insect migration effects to the model to gauge its sustainability, then other people could make each part of the model more accurate, etc. I think it would help us find real solutions to many problems in a much faster way than listening to political speeches or exchanging paragraphs of imprecise human language on social networking sites.