A group of educators & technologists met from April 11-13 here in rainy Vancouver to think about how improvements to wiki technology and its periphery could bring about a "tectonic shift" in education:

http://wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank

I co-facilitated the meeting together with Wayne Mackintosh of the Commonwealth of Learning (col.org), which runs the WikiEducator site (I provide hosting & technical support for it). I think we made good progress on identifying some key improvements that we need to make. There was a broad consensus, I believe, that rewriting MediaWiki in a "top down" manner is not a realistic approach to realizing these improvements. Rather, the continuous integration of gradual improvements that are developed in a decentral ecosystem seems like the way to go.

You can see some of our tech notes here (follow the links): http://wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank/Tech_requirements

Various people from IRC provided helpful feedback throughout the event, and we tried some skypecasting as well. We also heard presentations on interesting technologies such as the eXe eLearning editor (exelearning.org), which could potentially become an offline editor for MediaWiki. I'm especially happy that John Q. Smith from Wikia dropped in and gave us a good overview of the various projects they are working on.

In terms of resourcing, we've already had some good conversations, and beyond the funding capabilities of the stakeholders themselves, we might want to also pursue a joined grant proposal at some stage (there are a number of foundations which support educational technology). Practically, the MediaWiki NG mailing list (see other mail) is probably going to be used for some of these discussions.

I'm very pleased with the outcomes so far, and Brion seemed to be happy as well. MediaWiki has a very healthy interest community around it, which, when leveraged, could make great improvements happen.