It would certainly be excellent for Wikiversity to be acknowledged to this extent and put to some practical use. However, what will the use of Wikiversity for this purpose involve?

I assume we could even have a 'KDE Developing 101' course that links to various lessons around the wiki that potential developers need to use; organises materials in an easy to use manner and offers much more depth for those who are interested.

Of course, I have some doubts over the integrity of the material. We can't be teaching the potential KDE devs incorrect information; it is important in general that we maintain the quality of content on Wikiversity.

A delivery medium such as that of Wikiversity is always useful; when teaching students programming, I choose to teach by example, providing them snippets to try out and explaining how I wrote the snippets. Wikiversity's (in fact, Mediawiki's) code block system (appending line content to a space) means that code is readily available, easy to look at and useful for purpose of example.

In addition, contributing to KDE isn't a textbook subject. Topics constantly change, new discoveries are made, new techniques are developed. Wikiversity allows for easy updating of content (the purpose of a wiki) so current KDE devs can easily add their sidenotes and tips for potential coders.

These are just a few general suggestions; when promoting Wikiversity, it could be an idea to focus on what makes Wikiversity different and why that has any relevance at all to teaching potential KDE devs. Keep in mind the alternatives to Wikiversity - learning from a book, attending expensive uni courses etc.

-- Akash / Draicone

On 9/19/06, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all,

I just thought I'd let you know that I'm meeting (informally) with a couple of people from KDE [1] at their upcoming conference [2] in Dublin - about Wikiversity. (Well, actually, we're meeting this Friday, the day before the conference officially begins, but that's the only day that suits.) From what I gather, they're thinking of using Wikiversity as a training centre/programme for their developers - which sounds like a very practical application for Wikiversity (and applicable to MediaWiki development also), so we'll see what comes out of it. I'm really just there as a person to explain to them what Wikiversity is and what it could be used for, but, since I'm not very technically minded, any ideas or things to bear in mind would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Cormac / Cormaggio

[1] http://www.kde.org/ [2] http://conference2006.kde.org

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