Hi all,
Have you discussed about the possibility to host mailing lists, IRC channels and VoIP conference calls for the study courses using Wikiversity?
This way the teachers could actually have a class in the Wikiversity. These collaboration services would bring Wikiversity to new level: not to be a repository of self-study materials, but hmm... University (community) ran on Wiki :-)
I wrote sometime ago about the community and social aspects of Wikiversity in here:
http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=wikiversity-time-to-vote
Best regards,
- Teemu
----------------------------------------------- Teemu Leinonen http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/ +358 50 351 6796 Media Lab http://mlab.uiah.fi University of Art and Design Helsinki -----------------------------------------------
Mailing lists is certainly a possibility. However, be aware that things like IRC channels are outside the scope of the project. The official IRC channel isn't hosted by Wikiversity (well, WMF), so why should the unofficial ones be? People are free to start a channel on freenode as and when they feel like it. As for a live conversation, I might be able to develop a teacher-student classroom real time conversation system. It won't exactly be feature rich, so no whiteboard or learning material library, but it should offer authenticated teachers ability to upload learning materials and manage the conversation, and it serves the purpose. We could even host it on toolserver. I've got clearance for a toolserver account, but being on leave (officially and unofficially) I haven't bothered to set it up yet. Any suggestions?
On 11/20/06, Teemu Leinonen teemu.leinonen@uiah.fi wrote:
Hi all,
Have you discussed about the possibility to host mailing lists, IRC channels and VoIP conference calls for the study courses using Wikiversity?
This way the teachers could actually have a class in the Wikiversity. These collaboration services would bring Wikiversity to new level: not to be a repository of self-study materials, but hmm... University (community) ran on Wiki :-)
I wrote sometime ago about the community and social aspects of Wikiversity in here:
http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=wikiversity-time-to-vote
Best regards,
- Teemu
Teemu Leinonen http://www.uiah.fi/~tleinone/ +358 50 351 6796 Media Lab http://mlab.uiah.fi University of Art and Design Helsinki
Wikiversity-l mailing list Wikiversity-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiversity-l
On 19/11/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
Mailing lists is certainly a possibility. However, be aware that things like IRC channels are outside the scope of the project. The official IRC channel isn't hosted by Wikiversity (well, WMF), so why should the unofficial ones be? People are free to start a channel on freenode as and when they feel like it. As for a live conversation, I might be able to develop a teacher-student classroom real time conversation system. It won't exactly be feature rich, so no whiteboard or learning material library, but it should offer authenticated teachers ability to upload learning materials and manage the conversation, and it serves the purpose. We could even host it on toolserver. I've got clearance for a toolserver account, but being on leave (officially and unofficially) I haven't bothered to set it up yet. Any suggestions?
Just to note that there was, at some time, talk of integrating MediaWiki with an online learning system, or at least making it pluggable. That didn't seem to kick off, but perhaps it's worth revisiting?
Rob Church
I don't think there's much benefit to Wikimedia actually hosting IRC channels since freenode already does that better than we could. However, it would be useful if Wikimedia would create web gateways to IRC for those without IRC clients. You can easily customise different gateways for different Wikiversity courses. See http://irc.wikia.com/marvel/ for an example of one made for the Marvel Database Project. It uses the open source CGI:IRC program available from http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/. I don't know of a reason for Wikimedia not to host these gateways, but if they really won't, I expect that Wikia would be happy to do this.
Angela
On 20/11/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think there's much benefit to Wikimedia actually hosting IRC channels since freenode already does that better than we could.
Agreed. Running IRC servers isn't hard, running them well, and having them set up to handle a Wikimediaesque load is. The development and server administration teams don't really need the hassle of operating these, and I doubt we want a new clique to form to run them either. Freenode do an adequate enough job for our needs, and we seem to have a good reputation with them.
Rob Church
Angela kirjoitti 20.11.2006 kello 5:54:
However, it would be useful if Wikimedia would create web gateways to IRC for those without IRC clients.
I agree. I guess guidelines how to use mailing lists and IRC in an online classes would be useful, too. Where in the Wikiversity site one should write these?
- Teemu
On 11/20/06, Teemu Leinonen teemu.leinonen@uiah.fi wrote:
Angela kirjoitti 20.11.2006 kello 5:54:
However, it would be useful if Wikimedia would create web gateways to IRC for those without IRC clients.
I agree. I guess guidelines how to use mailing lists and IRC in an online classes would be useful, too. Where in the Wikiversity site one should write these?
- Teemu
Teemu, thank you for bringing up this subject - it's something we've discussed but not put into practice yet. There was an early initiative by Robert Horning to teach calculus through IRC, though I've no idea how successful it was. If you want to contact him, his Wikibooks userpage would probably be quickest: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Robert_Horning
On your question, there is currently a page on Wikiversity about how to get in touch with other Wikiversity/Wikimedia community members via IRC: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Chat. I was unsure of whether to set up a page at something like: <http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Using IRC> (link doesn't exist - yet!), but decided to send this email first. If you want to set this up yourself, you're free to do so. Or, perhaps, if you'd like to discuss these things via IRC, you're always most welcome to join us on irc.freenode channel: #wikiversity-en
Hope to take this further - and "kiitos" again :-)
On 11/20/06, Angela beesley@gmail.com wrote:
It uses the open source CGI:IRC program available from http://cgiirc.sourceforge.net/. I don't know of a reason for Wikimedia not to host these gateways, but if they really won't, I expect that Wikia would be happy to do this.
Teemu, perhaps your university could host such a gateway for us? That would take it out of our hair, and since the FreeNode chat isn't operated by Wikimedia anyway, it would be a fairly uncontroversial way to start working together.
It would be useful for the IRC gateways to be integrated with the wiki in the same way the portals like www.wikipedia.org are. That way each course could make their own landing page on the wiki rather than someone with server access needing to create an HTML page for every course. For example, http://irc.wikiversity.org/law/ would point people to the law channels with #wikiversity-law as the default one rather than listing hundreds of options or expecting IRC newbies to understand that they need to type /join #wikiversity-law once connected.
Angela.
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