I’ve been uploading educational content into wikiversity like a man possessed. But today, wikiversity’s servers went down, and its been like that all day 😦 so I’m forced to look for more reliable services. Its a good thing when this happens actually. Leaving aside the inconvenience, It keeps me on my toes and therefore reasonably knowledgeable of a broader range of services as I go shopping for a backup. (its worth noting that our own internally managed systems go down for much longer than a day at times, so forget about adding a comment along those lines).
So while I was cursing the small inconvenience this downtime has caused Brent Simpson pops up in my Gtalk box to show me the tutorials for using wikieducator.
And there’s where I’ll be taking my work. Wikieducator also uses the mediawiki platform so its basically a simple process of copy n paste from wikiversity to wikieducator to get my resources up and available again.
Wikieducator, which is facilitated by the Commonwealth of Learning has made fantastic progress since last I looked! Apart for a range of great tutorials, the key players in wikieducator have been more innovative and experimental in my view. They now have a web based IRC chat facility on the main nav – which is getting closer to Teemu’s vision of a VOIP supported community learning network; they support media embedding, they use funky templates to play around with navigation and content layout, and they already have some significant contributions:
And the old eXe project is right in there amongst it all, hopefully working out a way to format to and out of wikitext so that wikieducator (or any mediawiki content for that matter) can be made more interoperable with other platforms like the die hard LMSes.. loath the day 😦
So Wikieducator has scored big points in my books over wikiversity, and while the tow platforms both say they do different things, I don’t see the difference. Which is a real shame, because they are both aiming for the same thing – a global platform for the open sharing and collaborative development of quality learning spaces. Which is why I think they should join forces and rename themselves wikilearner.org because let’s face it, they ARE doing very similar things, they are diluting each other’s efforts, and both their name’s suck.
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February 16, 2007 at 5:13 am
Alex Hayes
I know the feeling well Leigh.
Thats why we’ve gone wikimedia at NSW LearnScope – http://nswlearnscope.com/wiki ….and it mirrors to all the right archives.
Should be a fun journey this year and we will only have ourselves ( and the server ) to blame.
Cheers.
February 17, 2007 at 7:52 pm
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February 18, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Teemu
Thank you for keeping us updated about the Wikiversity / Wikieducator development. I am also closely following them – and not only because we are developing LeMill (http://lemill.net), the European alternative for these.
I think the greatest challenge with the Wikiversity and Wikieducator is the fact that they are based on the hypothesis that wiki (MediaWiki) is a good platform for building learning materials. We know that wiki is a great platform for building encyclopaedias. We also know that it is *not* very good platform for delivering news (http://en.wikinews.org) or for publishing books (http://en.wikibooks.org). Is wiki-platform (MediaWiki) good for collaborative construction of teaching and learning materials, and for organizing educational activities around them? I am not sure, but I may be wrong, too.
From these two wiki edu-services I personally favour Wikiversity over Wikieducator. This is because Wikiversity is multi-lingual, it is build by volunteers around the world and it is not tighten-up to any single political community with its own agenda.
February 18, 2007 at 7:27 pm
leighblackall
Hi Teemu, I think you make 2 very important points here.
I have also wondered if mediawiki is a good platform for developing content? I have personally seen more content development by teachers happening over at the wikispaces – and I think allot of their success has to do with ease of use and ability to embed all forms of popular social media right into the page. Clearly that ability is considered more important by the majority of web savvy teachers than non commercial platforms, and open format standards. A shame, but a reality.
So I think that I agree that the mediawiki platform is not the best, but I hold out hope that as more and more teachers become aware of wikipedia as more than an info source, they will want in on some form of wikiaction that is more than wikipedia – just as we are looking for wiki or collaborative writing platforms for teaching resources. All in all, it will always be a mash up of media that enables collaboration. The ability to embed media from all sorts of places is what teachers have always needed.
I also had initial concerns with wikieducator being tied to one political charge, not that I had any problems with that particular charge, just the potential for it to be a problem. The neutrality of wikiversity is inherent, but is also a problem as the political action of wikiversity is variable and unclear. Take the example of me requesting that they make it possible to load a wikivesity page into a frame. I needed this so that the teachers I work for did not bork when they couldn’t get a wikiversity page into their LMS. I didn’t get a reasonable answer from wikiversity technicians on this, instead I got what amounted to a poltical stance, and one that conflicted with one of their objectives – that being to get educators involved in creating resources. Unfortunately a vast majority of educators are locked into LMS teaching practices, and want the ability to display web pages within their LMS context. While I am trying to circuit break this equally irrational practice, a middle ground could have been found if wikiversity let their stance go. They didn’t, but wikieducator did, and so it will be easier to get more teachers involved in wikieducator. Perhaps wikiversity does not want teachers involved so much, at least not the ones that think through LMS. That is something I would understand, but not something I can immediately help with.
February 18, 2007 at 9:51 pm
brent
I’ve been following both projects for quite some time now and I feel that there are actually quite different missions to each project and that while collaboration and conversation between the two is definately worthwhile it may not be necessary for the two to fuse into one, or that having two seperate sites is such a bad thing at this point.
WikiEducator has the primary goal of providing a substantial number of curriculum texts and content (the printed versions of which may be of great benefit to developing societies) in wiki format. Wikiversity has a somewhat more debated and conceptual goal of creating a new educational space that may be intimately tied to Wikipedia or the idea of a work-space between expert & learner (see: http://collaboration.wikia.com/wiki/Wikiversity). Both have agendas and ideologies in place and it should be noted that while Wikiversitys focus would seem to be on highly networked societies, with information literacy skills that are substantially developed, WikiEducator is to some degree also motivated by the needs of developing societies. It also seems from their own documenation and discussion that it is still somewhat questionable whether Wikiversity will even continue under the auspices of the Wikimedia foundation. The initial proposal for Wikiversity that, “Wikiversity is a centre for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities” was rejected by the board, which said that Wikiversity should not try to organize itself around a set of conventional courses. The modified project proposal from the Wikiversity people shifted the emphasis of Wikiversity from courses to “learning projects”, which means learning activities and practices that make sense for users of a wiki. On the other hand WikiEducator would seem to be directed towards just what the Wikimedia board said Wikiversity should not — developing content resources.
I think that we would all agree that wiki is not the end all and be all of online learning, it’s just one egg in a rich basket. These project are both in their early stages and we can learn a lot from their successes and their mistakes. Ultimately I think that WikiEducator is after as much good content (including the easy insertion of multimedia content), covered by as free a licence as possible, with as much support as possible. Wikiversity is at this point more of an experiment but in such may have a lot to teach us about teaching/learning using wikis.
February 18, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Teemu
You are such a good queen’s boy. 🙂
If we all agree that there is no use for LMS, how long you will let teachers to cheat themselves? I think Wikiversity people maid a favour for you (and your teachers) when they didn’t allow you to bring wikiversity content to the LMS frame.
BTW: The political stance in this case was “liberty”. I think this is one of the core values of the Wikiversity.
February 18, 2007 at 11:34 pm
leighblackall
Queen’s boy!? What could you mean… something to do with the Commonwealth?
If that favour actually encouraged the teachers to break out of their LMS and use AND contribute to Wikiversity, then that would be doing me/us a favour. But it didn’t, instead they turned away. Frustrating, if only they could see the liberty idea, and value it. But they can’t and so don’t.
February 19, 2007 at 8:11 am
Wayne
Hi Leigh, Brent and Teemu
Its wonderful to see this healthy dynamic and discourse taking place. We should dub this the Wikiversity – WikiEducator debates ..;-)
Just a few observations for the record:
1. When we searched for a domain name – my preference was for Wikilearner or Wikilearning available under .com, .org and .net. Sadly they were already taken …;-(.
2. Wikieducator does not have a political agenda – it is a website to facilitate collaborative authoring of free content. It was set up by the Commonwealth of Learning as a space for the 53 member countries of the Commonwealth to work collaboratively on learning for development. We welcome participation from anywhere in the world. English – by virtue of the Commonwealth is a common language in these countries and WikiEducator does not pretend to be anything it isn’t. However, it is interesting to see a number of European based projects excercising their freedom to use WikiEducator and Francophone Africa has commenced with a French translation of the site. In fact there is a dutch translation of some content in progress at the moment. We are a community of educators that believe in Education as a common good. We have no problem sharing our community knowledge with others – because will we still have it for ourselves to use.
3. Wikieducator is not in opposition to Wikiversity, We are playing a small role in the strategic vision of developing a free version of the entire curriculum by 2015. We do not presume that we can do this alone and are working together with other projects to achieve this aim.
4. We do not see the Wiki as the panacea to solving the worlds educational challenges – it is nonetheless a powerful tool to facilitate the collaborative authoring of learning content. Our experience in distance education provides us with a solid foundation to move forward with enhancing the educational value of content for learning. We will be working on a number of technology enhancements to increase the utility of wiki-based content development. For example a wiki-pdf feature to widen access to content for learners who do not have the have access to the Internet or even text books. The integration of threaded discussions into Mediawiki software.
Our aim is simple – to widen access to education. That’s why we removed the frames problem. We respect institutional freedom to use the technologies of their choices – we do our best not to make value judgements. If this helps instutions to widen access to a greater range of content – then we’re making a difference.
We will continue to innovate as you have done with MobileEd – a brilliant project. I hope you can help us.
February 19, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Teemu
Comment in here: Wikiversity, Wikieducator and politics?
February 21, 2007 at 6:22 pm
Cormac Lawler
This is a very stimulating and worthwhile discussion – and I’ve yet to go read Teemu’s post.. 🙂
There is tons to write about, but I feel I must firstly clear up some misconceptions about Wikiversity. Wikiversity most certainly is an experiment – but that does not mean that it is not also traditional (or useful in traditional settings/contexts). At Wikiversity, we are most definitely developing content that can be used in courses, within Wikiversity or for external use – distance-based or face-to-face. The approved project proposal does place a large amount of emphasis on learning projects and the process of learning in a wiki context (mainly because this was the part hitherto least-understood) – but it also states that it will develop “free-content, multilingual learning materials/resources, for all age groups in all languages”.
Brent also says that Wikiversity is geared towards “highly networked societies” – however, I would say that it simply currently reflects a limited userbase due to its limited outreach and lack of media exposure – but that there’s nothing to say that it might not be a force for social/political/economic change and/or development (key passions of mine, as it happens). I think, though, it’s fair to say that both Wikiversity and WikiEducator have ‘organisations’ (of some description) behind them, and their ‘core competencies’ can’t help but reflect that. I personally envy WikiEducator to the extent that it is focussed on its specific developmental goals – Wikiversity has no other specific social goals than the development and sharing of free educational content and contexts. I’ve said much the same at WikiEducator also.
Which brings me to my final comment – about Leigh’s problem of frames and LMSs. I have to say that this matter has not really been explored sufficiently – Leigh’s frustration stems from the fact that I said that it hadn’t been considered to be a good idea in another circumstance – but that we needed to look into it more. I think this has more to do with the fact that Wikiversity is a small project, still developing within the Wikimedia community, and still working through issues that need to be addressed with the ever-hectic developer community – rather than any indication of a lack of willingness. Having said this, however, I kinda agree with Teemu that we’re providing a different context for the content on Wikiversity – but that, nevertheless, the content is still there to be used at liberty.
All the best,
Cormac
February 22, 2007 at 1:21 am
Cormac’s blog
[…] been linking up with the Wikieducator project over the last week, and it was this post by Leigh Blackall that prompted me to take another look into that project. Interestingly, it was Leigh’s […]
February 22, 2007 at 3:36 pm
Cormac Lawler
Update: Leigh, after chatting with some Wikimedia developers, I think the frames issue has been resolved in Wikimedia (and hence Wikiversity) – it would be interesting to see if it works for you now. As I understand it, the issue was more linked with confusions and complaints around sites that serve Wikimedia pages inside frames with heavy advertising (while not making it clear that this is added by the external site, and not Wikimedia). I still don’t fully understand the complaints, the rationale for disabling frame-loading, nor the solutions to it – but I think the basic lesson here is: talk to the people who *know* rather than those who don’t. 😉
February 23, 2007 at 1:14 am
leighblackall
Thanks Cormac,
The frames issue should have been a small one in my view. I can understand the concerns of loading wikiversity content into different contexts, but there simply is no controlling that – nor should there be in my view. At this stage in the wikiversity project, I think it is about riding the success of wikipedia and drawing the education sector into the effort.
But perhaps this is not what wikiversity wants. Perhaps it sees that the education sector is a failing model and wants to offer an alternative and not be side tracked by over involvement from the sector…
A bold position to hold, but one I’d respect and enjoy seeing if that was the case.
April 9, 2007 at 12:37 pm
qplko
Good site!!!
June 24, 2007 at 5:49 am
Learn to speak french
Does wikieducator and wikiuniversity have French programs like learn to speak French? That would be very helpful for everyone that wants to learn French and can’t afford any programs.