[Mediawiki-l] Vancouver workshop outcomes

[Erik Moeller]

A group of educators & technologists met from April 11-13 here in
rainy Vancouver to think about how improvements to wiki technology and
its periphery could bring about a "tectonic shift" in education:

http://wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank

I co-facilitated the meeting together with Wayne Mackintosh of the
Commonwealth of Learning (col.org), which runs the WikiEducator site
(I provide hosting & technical support for it). I think we made good
progress on identifying some key improvements that we need to make.
There was a broad consensus, I believe, that rewriting MediaWiki in a
"top down" manner is not a realistic approach to realizing these
improvements. Rather, the continuous integration of gradual
improvements that are developed in a decentral ecosystem seems like
the way to go.

You can see some of our tech notes here (follow the links):
http://wikieducator.org/Tectonic_shift_think_tank/Tech_requirements

Various people from IRC provided helpful feedback throughout the
event, and we tried some skypecasting as well. We also heard
presentations on interesting technologies such as the eXe eLearning
editor (exelearning.org), which could potentially become an offline
editor for MediaWiki. I'm especially happy that John Q. Smith from
Wikia dropped in and gave us a good overview of the various projects
they are working on.

In terms of resourcing, we've already had some good conversations, and
beyond the funding capabilities of the stakeholders themselves, we
might want to also pursue a joined grant proposal at some stage (there
are a number of foundations which support educational technology).
Practically, the MediaWiki NG mailing list (see other mail) is
probably going to be used for some of these discussions.

I'm very pleased with the outcomes so far, and Brion seemed to be
happy as well. MediaWiki has a very healthy interest community around
it, which, when leveraged, could make great improvements happen.
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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