Hi Joe, Geoffrey, all,
I like the idea of a collaboration with PlanetMath, and I also think it's a great idea to start thinking seriously about how to turn work done in Wikiversity and other online spaces into academic credit. On open accreditation, P2PU are doing some work on this, as (I think) are Wikieducator, and of course David Wiley has done some great work in the last two years or so. Wikiversity has long had these discussions, and a few proposed initiatives, but nothing concrete so far. Still, early days... :-)
I'm very interested in talking more. I've just finished my own PhD about Wikiversity's first two years of development as a learning space. :-)
Joe, I'm intrigued by your statement on your slides that PlanetMath might have "the most potential" for gaining academic credit. What do you mean here? Does PlanetMath have any institutional affiliations already set up that would facilitate this?
I think your OU contacts might be very useful. OU is forward-looking, and of course their OpenLearn initiative is very interested in pushing forward opportunities in the world of OER. I have contacts in OpenLearn if you want me to put you in touch. Also, on your request for CS people that might be interested, I don't know if they'd be interested, but I'm working with some of the people in the CS department in the University of Manchester (where I'm based, school of education) who are pretty open-minded.
Anyway, let's keep talking - thanks for the spark. :-)
Cormac
2010/3/31 Geoffrey Plourde geo.plrd@yahoo.com
Joe,
One of the issues with running a for credit class on Wikiversity is that the Wikimedia Board specifically doesn't want us (the participants) running certification/accredited classes under the Foundation's umbrella. This doesn't bar us from hosting them, (I'm designing one for a school right now), it just requires that a organization be willing to sponsor it. We are also working on a sandbox server which might be able to host a CMS like Moodle to expand on the wiki software.
Other projects have discussed collapsing into Wikimedia, but the community tends to be pretty reluctant about approving new projects. Wikiversity is the newest project, and was approved in 2006. It would probably be better to maintain a partnership, and perhaps have PlanetMath collapse into a new free university or something.
Geoffrey
*From:* Joe Corneli holtzermann17@gmail.com *To:* Mailing list for Wikiversity wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Sent:* Wed, March 31, 2010 8:27:51 AM *Subject:* Re: [Wikiversity-l] planetmath teamup?
Joe, it sounds like a cool idea. Feel free to be bold and work on it.
Definitely. I think that at this point "coalition building" is a reasonable objective. We have tons of *ideas*, but I think implementation is going to take somewhat broad-based support. I've been talking to the Teaching Open Source folks (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Main_Page) and they like the idea.
Who would be the college for the for-credit class?
We're definitely still in "looking around" mode. As I mentioned, I'm at The Open University, UK, and I brought the idea up with some of the maths people here. But that was just yesterday and now I'm waiting to hear back. A more conventional college that nevertheless likes experimental/innovative courses might be a better bet. (Ideas welcome. CS or mathematics faculty champions especially welcome :)
The Wikiversity IRC channel is always open, and users are generally in
there
to talk further. You can also bring it up on the Colloquium on
Wikiversity.
I anticipate a lot of large-scale issues around "Wiki versus Noosphere" (Noosphere is PlanetMath's hand-rolled collaboration platform). And in the long-term, I wonder whether the PlanetMath/Noosphere project can get folded into Wikimedia on an organizational level. So... there will be lots of things to talk about.
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