There is much in Morley's questions/frustrations that I can empathise with, but there is a lot of sense here from Michael. I'm not going to labour over everything but I'll pick out some salient points (as I see them).
Morley:
Accredited universities do not have a lock, a patent on the terms "teacher", "student", "instructor" or "course". Lots of institutions of learning which do not give or require accreditation use these terms every day, world wide. There's no good reason for the Wikiversity to avoid commonplace terminology.
Michael:
Well I agreed with your position above initially. However, after watching a few teenagers set themselves up as "Department Heads" I now have a better appreciation of some of the nuances of anonymous internet participation. Something most of the members of the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation have probably been immersed in for several years in various ways.
As I now see it the good reason to avoid common place terminology is that it carries a lot of baggage. Most people hear teacher and think "qualified professional compensated by the institution" not "precocious teenager or retired project manager who can help me review thermodynamics if I cross check and verify all facts and reasoning for myself".
This is a thorny issue and one we definitely need to address more head-on in the not-too-distant future. Wikiversity will definitely have people who are there to help other people learning and there will be other people simply there to learn (or perhaps even to "be taught"). I don't think there is anything wrong with calling oneself a "teacher" or "student" (in fact, some people have suggested that we need some sort of differential login for teachers and students in particular circumstances). However, I think the fundamental tenet of a learning community is that anybody can be either/both simultaneously. This is why I like the proposed Wikiversity motto: "Where the teachers learn and the learners teach" (and its variants).
Teenagers calling themselves professors or heads of department - well, we need to avoid being too ageist here and recognise that some of the best contributors to Wikiversity so far have been teenagers (and the fact that we will need to invert, to an extent, the age-old preconceptions of who a "teacher" is - or "expert", for that matter). But I find personally distasteful something we've seen in the past which is like someone "claiming" a department for themselves (simply because they were first on the scene). This is really bad for building and developing a learning community. What I think we need to be doing is to list ourselves as "participants" - then, some of us will facilitate, point etc, and some of us will ask to be guided - and we will switch between these roles depending on our needs, knowledge etc.
Fundamentally, in my view, Wikiversity isn't about the *conferring* of such titles as "teacher" or "professor" on people - though we *should* recognise the expertise someone brings to Wikiversity, including that of being a teacher in a brick-and-mortar institution. However, we need to adapt the "baggage" of such terms to the building of such an open learning community/system as Wikiversity.
By stating up front this is NOT an accredited learning situation that whole issue really ought to be put aside and simply get on with it. To ban courses or to try to invent some other word, to ban teachers or try to invent some other word, you're making the institution look foolish.
Actually I am not responsible. The "institution" can only look foolish if the terms and the name Wikiversity are activating preconceptions in the listener. Thus demonstrating what others have called "the wisdom of the Board" in asking that we avoid these terms to reduce confusion to newcomers.
I don't think we are about banning teachers - or even courses. As far as defining Wikiversity goes, I'm not a hardline radical (even though I would like us to become something radical). I think we have considerable flexibility in our proposal - and this includes constructing materials in the format of a course that someone can follow themselves - with links to pages where activities, discussions take place between people in the role of teachers/facilitators and some people in the role of learers/students. Specifically how this works hasn't been fully explained (or 'discovered') - this is one of the primary things that we are trying to learn about as we experiment. So, I would urge you, Morley, to be experimental, and not see this is as a stumbling block. And if you/we find that there is a particular element to our processes that are particularly brilliant or problematic, we can start to develop guidelines help pages, and maybe policies around these elements. But really, to a large extent, we are more knowledgeable than the board in this respect - part of the original rejection and subsequent furore around the "exclude online courses" recommendation was because there was a lack of clarity in the original proposal. What we have now does not - as far as i see it - prevent anyone from following a "traditional" route as their preferred mode of pedagogy. However, for better or worse, I am going to revive his discussion soon - probably on the Foundation-l mailing list - to try to get some clarity on why the original proposal was rejected and place it within the context of recent discussions.
A Wikiversity with teaching materials but no support for online teaching would be a major piece of foolishness. And to obsess over this issue is simply alienating.
?? Forgive me but I think you are completely wrong above. If Wikiversity accomplishes nothing but becoming a large online free repository of useful GPL'ed teaching/studying/learning materials covering wide sections of human knowledge then it will be an outstanding accomplishment rivaling the invention of the printing press.
Personally I think we can establish support for online learning and have been continually amazed that no professional instituation or government has tackled this for the shear economic benefits to society ..... the ever present fear of layoff I suppose. Perhaps amateurs and professionals working together at Wikiversity can accomplish this obvious benefit of interactive learning computer technology. If not, then just the repository of GPL'ed information will still be of great value to every society which chooses to allow its free use.
I fully agree with Michael here. In fact, a "free repository of resources" was one of the original proposals for wikiversity - and one which i thought we were being forced into following the board's original rejection. Since then, however, we have sculpted a proposal which promotes the developing of learning communities - so we explicitly also allow for teaching and learning - however successful or not this experiment will actually turn out to be.
There are other points that I'd like to address, but I think I've sketched my general take on this for now. Fundamentally though, I'd like to thank you Morley for your keen interest and dedicated and patient work on-wiki. I'll be seeing you around. And, also, good to hear from you again, Michael :-)
Warm regards, Cormac