Thanks Juan for this all too rare insight into the status of other language wikiversities. ABD puts up a defence for English Wikiversity which I'd support.

I thought you'd be interested in noticing a small corner on English Wikiversity where original research is taking place. There is my own, where I'm enjoying using the wiki to support and document a process of data collection to drafting, then peer review and then redrafting. I draw inspiration from wikinews for this.

There is also the use of English Wikiversity by the university of Canberra, where I'm based, and UCNISS, a teaching and research institute based at the university Canberra. Their work is focused on sport and physical activity. I am employed by them to build their presence across social media like wikiversity.

Unfortunately, I have encountered a few wikimedia foundation people who see this sort of activity as little more than "hosting", revealing a disturbing frame of view toward wikiversity purpose, along the lines of what ABD points out. I can only hope enough time will be given for these and other examples WITHIN English Wikiversity to mature and show something. On Jul 21, 2011 3:16 AM, "Abd ulRahman Lomax" abdlomax@yahoo.com wrote:

Thanks, Juan, interesting. En.wv largely represents a view that education

is

about people and what people do, not just about content. Education as pure

content is academically discredited in the world of education, there has

come to

be much more concern about process, learning as process, a process that continues, life-long, if people learn how to learn, which includes

exploration

and investigation, not merely imbibing what has been predigested by

someone

else.

On En.wv, the forces toward reduction of education to content, which,

then, of

course, must be "correct" and "approved," are active, but do not dominate.

Wikiversity, at least en with which I'm familiar, is the only WMF wiki

where

discussion of topics is actually encouraged. You can be blocked on

Wikipedia for

trying to discuss an article topic on the Talk page there, and sometimes

even

for trying to discuss in user space.

One of the oddities I've seen is that, on Talk:Cold fusion it is actually recommended that if you want to discuss the topic, you use a mailing list

that

focuses on fringe and weird science, the vortex list, but attempts to link

to

the Wikiversity resource, where discussion can actually help develop

learning

resources, have been interdicted, on the argument that Wikiversity is "self-published."

Definnitely, there is work to do letting Wikipedians know about

Wikiversity. It

would be ideal to suggest to Wikipedians that if they want to talk about

and

learn about the topic intereactively, that Wikiversity is open for this,

instead

of what usually happens: they are told to go away.

In real universities, around the world, and for centuries, what might be

called

"fringe" views are studied, developed, researched, and taught, as such. Individual professors express their opinions and do original research, and

students do the same, in course work and for degree dissertations and

papers.

I can easily see a grading system as being possible, and overall

neutrality

policy suggests that poor work should not be prominent, but it takes a lot

of

work to design and implement some overall system. En.wikiversity is still

in

very primitive condition.

In some ways yes Juan. We have experienced 2 major disruptions to its development from wikimedia foundation staff, as well as internal hostilities on questions of purpose, over the past 6 years.

Defensiveness is a bad sign in any project however, so we must be cautious not to portray such sentiment in our over all communications.

My main point think though, is to look deeper than the collected whole of en.wv and look into the different projects, experiments, etc. On Jul 21, 2011 3:44 PM, "Juan de Vojníkov" juandevojnikov@gmail.com wrote:

BTW guys, do you feel a need to defend English Wikiversity?

Juan

Leigh Blackall, 20/07/2011 23:56:

Unfortunately, I have encountered a few wikimedia foundation people who see this sort of activity as little more than "hosting", revealing a disturbing frame of view toward wikiversity purpose [...]

I don't think you can expect anything else from the WMF. Try to contact the local chapter (Wikimedia Australia, I guess), they will certainly more helpful (unless you need huge software changes, obviously).

Nemo

Well,

I dont think that Beta worked so much to share experiences. If I want to have experience now, I have to go to those languages I understand and stay day for some time.

Regards, Juan

2011/7/20 Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com

Hi Jan,

Thanks for keeping us updated of your Wikimania talk, which looks very interesting! (Unfortunately, I won't be able to participate in Haifa - I'll have to see about participating remotely.)

I think it's an important point to make about the diversity of approaches between Wikiversity projects. Wikiversity is certainly a difficult fish to pin down. ;-) But it's worth also pointing out that the intention of setting up the beta.wikiversity project was not only to incubate new projects, but also share experiences between existing language projects. I'm not sure how useful it has been in that respect - my personal observation up until a year or so ago was that it hasn't really taken off in that regard, but others may disagree. I think it might be useful, in your presentation, to either reflect on that, or to point towards further potential work in sharing experiences, thoughts, etc between individual Wikiversity projects.

All the best, Cormac

On 20 Jul 2011, at 02:39 pm, Juan de Vojníkov wrote:

Hi,

I have just visited several Wikiversities in preparation of my presentation of this project on Wikimania:

http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/From_the_Wikiversity_con...

I red recent core discussions on cs, en, es, it, pt and ru and I am wondering how different approaches in fullfilling our missions are. Now it realy seems to me that Wikiversity is in fact researching e-learning in MediaWiki software. And because of the different approaches and different understandigs there might be multiple results.

Let me give you here a teaser: *pt, ru and es are based on brick and mortar school units (i.e. elementary schools, departments, institutes and so on) **from a realy interesting discussion on pt, I have find out that it for people who will come up to these units in the future and who create educationa materials arround themseves

http://pt.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversidade:Esplanada#Perfil_da_Wikiversida... *en and cs was open to deploy all of what contributers deployed. Nothing was deleted and sometimes this was causing problems not just within the Wikimedia community, but also at cs.wv. These languages are trying to sort this content recently, trying to put an order in to chaos, by type: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Help:Resources_by_type *recently on cs and ru, its some users were trying to have just live educational courses. The other stuff to mute or delete.

And others different approaches. So do not forget guys, there are also other Wikiversities, which are not copying en.wv

Regards, Juan _______________________________________________ Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l

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