[WikiEducator] Re: [OERU] Re: Great #OER logo -- Request to UNESCO to remove the No-derivatives restriction
On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 9:37 AM, Stephen Downes step...@downes.ca wrote: On 25/02/2012 9:19 PM, Cable Green wrote: UNESCO – please change the license from CC BY ND… to either CC BY … or CC BY SA… so we can all use it. What *their* license tells me is that (a) I can use it in this way, but (b) only if I don't replace the hands with smiley faces (or my corporate logo). I interpret the licence this way, as well. The trademarks of the Creative Commons, themselves, do not allow derivatives either, and there is a requirement that they point to the Creative Commons site and that they can be revoked at any time: http://creativecommons.org/policies Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
[WikiEducator] Re: [OERU] UNESCO-COL Chair for OER says OERu is the first practical implementation for cost-effective learning
Rory recently presented this message at the UNESCO OPAL meeting (November 14th). It was a well-received talk, from what I heard in people's discussions afterward. Peer-to-peer open education with OERu certification currently seems to be a very sustainable option that is worked out well enough to start implementation. Wayne, at the meeting, I talked with some people about organizing a post-meeting seminar, in a format similar to what we do at Math Future or you do around OERu: asynchronous discussions, then a webinar. Sustainability seems an important conversation thread. The seminar should probably start after their big Berlin meeting early December. What do you think? Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 8:10 PM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: In a recent interviewhttp://www.scoop.it/t/open-learning-news/p/691506005/terry-anderson-and-rory-mcgreal-speak-about-athabasca-university-and-the-oeru in the UK, Professor Rory McGreal highlights cost effectiveness as the key to success of the OERu: *Cost effectiveness is the key… How do we educate these 97 million learners … in a cost-effective manner? [OERu] .. is the first idea that I’ve seen that practical implementation is possible. And this could work. * * * *And the way it’d work is this: if we could get a cadre, so we get ten percent of them through, so that’s ten million students, but that means there’s a cadre of students who’ve done it, in all these little villages and towns all around the world, and they’re an example to the others, and then you can build on that and build on it and build, and that’s the way you do it. But not only that; we have developed self-motivated learners, and that’s what you need - you need a person who is a self motivated learner. That’s more important than anything they learn. And so we build that up and we’re away…* -- Wayne Mackintosh http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg, Ph.D. Director OER Foundation http://www.oerfoundation.org Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Founder and elected Community Council Member, WikiEducatorhttp://www.wikieducator.org Mobile +64 21 2436 380 Skype: WGMNZ1 Twitter http://twitter.com/#%21/Mackiwg | identi.cahttp://identi.ca/waynemackintosh Wikiblog http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg/Blog - -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
[WikiEducator] Re: [OERU] New York's open university joins forces with the OERu
Congratulations to OERu and to all educators and students of the world! Joyce, Wayne, well done - I know it took a lot of work administratively, even though the alignment of values is clear. YAY!!! Cheers, Maria Droujkova 919-388-1721 Make math your own, to make your own math On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 1:22 AM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Everyone ... An important update. Empire State College of the State University of New York joins forces with the OER university network. Read more: New York's open university joins forces with the OERuhttp://wikieducator.org/Empire_State_College/New_York%27s_open_university_joins_forces_with_the_OERu I intimated that 2011 will be quantum shift year for the mainstream adoption of OER -- watch this space . Wayne -- Wayne Mackintosh http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg, Ph.D. Director OER Foundation http://www.oerfoundation.org Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Founder and elected Community Council Member, WikiEducatorhttp://www.wikieducator.org Mobile +64 21 2436 380 Skype: WGMNZ1 Twitter http://twitter.com/#%21/Mackiwg | identi.cahttp://identi.ca/waynemackintosh Wikiblog http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg/Blog -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups OER university group. To post to this group, send email to oer-univers...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to oer-university+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/oer-university?hl=en?hl=en Visit the OER univeristy page on http://wikieducator.org/OER_university -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
Re: [OERU] Re: [WikiEducator] UNESCO social networking platform for the OER community -- Worth joining
Muvaffak and others, I like your call to think big. For the purpose, please consider the notion of combinatorics for course design. It comes from the principle of individualized and localized instruction. There are several dozen major schools of economics that want their Economy 101 to be quite different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_economics Let us say, 30. Different career paths require different beginner courses. At the very least, people who go into social sciences, physical sciences, and mathematics and statistics want different approaches to their economics. Multiply 30*30=90 at the very least, though ideally, courses address much more narrow fields, such as Economy 101 for freelance curriculum designers :-) Then consider developmental stages of learners. Economy 101 at the level of elementary arithmetic is very different from Economy 101 for post-doctorates who never happened to look at economics before. Traditional levels are elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate, though this system is very crude - but let's take it for now, so we have 90*5=450 There are a lot of choices in course design by how it is taught. Each choice means significant course redesign. Individually paced or lock-step paced? 450*2=900 Individual learning, small group, or large group? 900*3=2700 Teacher-driven or peer-to-peer? 2700*2=5400 Project-based or exercise-based? 5400*2=108,000 There are dozens more such variables. Then there are choices by media (rich media vs. books vs. experiential), by country and language and culture, by the length and the depth of the course... I think I made the point that the number of Economy 101 courses it would be good to have in the world, if education is to be individualized and localized, is measured by millions, not tens. In practice, this means going for highly modular structures of curriculum design. Categories such as those I named above become tags for curricular activities. Then a learner or an educator can put together a course by computer-assisted search through the database of course activities. Every new activity added to the system multiplies the possibilities of course creation, just like each new type of Lego blocks multiplies the number of possible constructions. Returning to Muvaffak's call - let's think big! Modular, open and combinatorial ideas in course and platform design definitely support it. Cheers, Dr. Maria Droujkova http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:23 PM, Muvaffak Gozaydin mgozay...@hotmail.comwrote: Why people make fad of everthing. Now OER is the new fashion . OER, ONLINE, OCW are for billions. They have to be managed by the government of the world. That is United Nation. Unfortunately they do not do their job well. All efforts and funds are wasted by many organisation. A very simple case There are 5000 Introduction nto Economics 101 ONLINE course in the world. Each one has cost about $ 100.000 may be more . This is waste of money. And also out of 5000 courses may be 4900 of them just a garbage. World needs only may be 50 or so Introduction to Economics 101 online course. Well but as always a good organiser is needed. Unfortunately there is only one but also not a good one organisation UN. Wake up gentelmen of the world. Have vision. Do not involve in small matters. Think big, think great . Muvaffak Gozaydin of Turkey mgozay...@hotmail.com www.globalonlineuniversitiesconsortium.org for 7 billion people of the world . At no cost . make it bigger . That is only bunch of LINKS. But best in the world. muvaffak gozaydin -- From: a.ca...@unesco.org Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 14:10:16 +0100 Subject: [OERU] Re: [WikiEducator] UNESCO social networking platform for the OER community -- Worth joining To: mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com CC: echer...@gmail.com; wikieducator@googlegroups.com; wikieducator-teacher-collaboration-fo...@googlegroups.com; oer-univers...@googlegroups.com Hi Edward, Wayne, all members of the WikiEducator Community The UNESCO OER Programme is focused on: 1. OER Policy Development - Education Sector 2. a new, innovative OER Platform - Communication and Information (CI) Sector I'm responsible for the OER Platform which will make selected UNESCO publications available as fully-licensed OERs allowing our global communities of practice to freely copy, adapt, and share. The Platform's in development and should be launched by the end of this year. It's common-sense to directly link with your global OER community to collect the best thoughts on developing the Platform so it was a pleasure to resurrect the original OER Community that was maintained by Susan D'Antoni. We didn't like the split between a Wiki and the SYMPA e-mail list and we needed both standard and new, advanced features for community interaction. We'd been using the open-source Elgg
Re: [OERU] Re: [WikiEducator] UNESCO social networking platform for the OER community -- Worth joining
Remove one zero in the last line of computation. On Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 5:40 AM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: Muvaffak and others, I like your call to think big. For the purpose, please consider the notion of combinatorics for course design. It comes from the principle of individualized and localized instruction. There are several dozen major schools of economics that want their Economy 101 to be quite different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_of_economics Let us say, 30. Different career paths require different beginner courses. At the very least, people who go into social sciences, physical sciences, and mathematics and statistics want different approaches to their economics. Multiply 30*30=90 at the very least, though ideally, courses address much more narrow fields, such as Economy 101 for freelance curriculum designers :-) Then consider developmental stages of learners. Economy 101 at the level of elementary arithmetic is very different from Economy 101 for post-doctorates who never happened to look at economics before. Traditional levels are elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate, though this system is very crude - but let's take it for now, so we have 90*5=450 There are a lot of choices in course design by how it is taught. Each choice means significant course redesign. Individually paced or lock-step paced? 450*2=900 Individual learning, small group, or large group? 900*3=2700 Teacher-driven or peer-to-peer? 2700*2=5400 Project-based or exercise-based? 5400*2=108,000 There are dozens more such variables. Then there are choices by media (rich media vs. books vs. experiential), by country and language and culture, by the length and the depth of the course... I think I made the point that the number of Economy 101 courses it would be good to have in the world, if education is to be individualized and localized, is measured by millions, not tens. In practice, this means going for highly modular structures of curriculum design. Categories such as those I named above become tags for curricular activities. Then a learner or an educator can put together a course by computer-assisted search through the database of course activities. Every new activity added to the system multiplies the possibilities of course creation, just like each new type of Lego blocks multiplies the number of possible constructions. Returning to Muvaffak's call - let's think big! Modular, open and combinatorial ideas in course and platform design definitely support it. Cheers, Dr. Maria Droujkova http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 12:23 PM, Muvaffak Gozaydin mgozay...@hotmail.comwrote: Why people make fad of everthing. Now OER is the new fashion . OER, ONLINE, OCW are for billions. They have to be managed by the government of the world. That is United Nation. Unfortunately they do not do their job well. All efforts and funds are wasted by many organisation. A very simple case There are 5000 Introduction nto Economics 101 ONLINE course in the world. Each one has cost about $ 100.000 may be more . This is waste of money. And also out of 5000 courses may be 4900 of them just a garbage. World needs only may be 50 or so Introduction to Economics 101 online course. Well but as always a good organiser is needed. Unfortunately there is only one but also not a good one organisation UN. Wake up gentelmen of the world. Have vision. Do not involve in small matters. Think big, think great . Muvaffak Gozaydin of Turkey mgozay...@hotmail.com www.globalonlineuniversitiesconsortium.org for 7 billion people of the world . At no cost . make it bigger . That is only bunch of LINKS. But best in the world. muvaffak gozaydin -- From: a.ca...@unesco.org Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 14:10:16 +0100 Subject: [OERU] Re: [WikiEducator] UNESCO social networking platform for the OER community -- Worth joining To: mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com CC: echer...@gmail.com; wikieducator@googlegroups.com; wikieducator-teacher-collaboration-fo...@googlegroups.com; oer-univers...@googlegroups.com Hi Edward, Wayne, all members of the WikiEducator Community The UNESCO OER Programme is focused on: 1. OER Policy Development - Education Sector 2. a new, innovative OER Platform - Communication and Information (CI) Sector I'm responsible for the OER Platform which will make selected UNESCO publications available as fully-licensed OERs allowing our global communities of practice to freely copy, adapt, and share. The Platform's in development and should be launched by the end of this year. It's common-sense to directly link with your global OER community to collect the best thoughts on developing the Platform so it was a pleasure to resurrect the original OER Community that was maintained by Susan D'Antoni. We didn't like
[WikiEducator] Come help the Math 2.0 community tonight, Wednesday March 3rd, at 9:30 ET
Gladys Gahona and Nellie Deutsch made a presentation about WikiEducator for the Math 2.0 series last October. WikiEducator is an excellent model of community building. Math 2.0 community needs help of experienced people in determining the directions of its growth and development. I would like to ask any of you with experience and ideas about community building to join us for a live discussion tonight. Here is the time converter for your time zone: *http://1ps.us/rdf6ew* ~*~*~*~*~* Event details All Math 2.0 events are free and open to the public. Wednesday, March 3rd 2010 we will meet in the LearnCentral public Elluminate room at 6:30pm Pacific / 9:30pm Eastern time: https://sas.elluminate.com/d.jnlp?sid=lceventspassword=Webinar_Guest I propose we get together and address some key community building themes. I will try my best to invite leaders and representatives of Math 2.0 communities who expressed an interest before, and I would like to ask everyone here to do the same. I see Math 2.0 Interest Group, when it develops to the next stage, as an alliance of communities with diverse members, interests, and projects: a community of communities. For this to happen, we need to define some structures for promoting conversations and collaborations. Here are two areas, open to change, we may discuss this Wednesday. Some of the questions about each area follow. *Math 2.0 community representatives* - Self-identify contact persons - community leaders or network nodes - representing each Math 2.0 community as ambassadors. Questions: Where and how is this contact information collected and made available? What about individuals joining on their own? - Representatives describe what areas interest their community. Question: What is the initial list of these tags, and how do we add to it? - Subgroups of representatives can invite their communities to collaborate on projects in common areas. Question: How do we define subgroups? How do we identify projects in different stages of maturity (idea, initial building, ongoing)? - Representatives pass on relevant messages to their communities, such as event and project information. Question: Who has access to this message structure and how do we support highly relevant information exchange? *Conferences and events 2010-2011* - For those of us presenting at events, build a conference intro pack with several rich media objects, open to collective authoring, and describing Math 2.0, member communities and their representatives, past and current projects within communities, ways to join, key terms and definitions. The goal is for anyone active in the Math 2.0 Interest Group to be able to quickly and easily put together a good presentation about the current state of events. Questions: Do we make this a completely open resource to be used by anyone? How do we organize everybody's contributions? - Define a better structure for the weekly events, with rotating moderators, rotating interesting platforms (such as 3d worlds) and a clear way for Math 2.0 members to identify and contact people they want to see as guests and hosts. Question: What is a good scheduler tool for multiple people scheduling events? - Identify conferences. Questions: What are good existing conferences to go to in 2010-2011, and which of us are already going? How can we help one another make our presentations better? - Plan Math 2.0 conferences. Questions: What are good venues for online conferences? What about face-to-face? Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
[WikiEducator] Re: Optimizing Knowledge Transfer
On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 9:05 PM, Alison Snieckus alison.sniec...@gmail.comwrote: Wonderful discussion. As to the use of the term teacher and teaching, I've been wondering lately if we educators who are interested in how we learn and how we help other people learn, including through teaching, when it can’t be avoided, but preferably through a wider variety of means and contexts might should promote the use of the word teacher to mean someone who provides guidance to individuals to help them learn what they desire, or even reach their potential to learn in a particular area. I think there's a need for someone to create a learning environment for the learner(s) that is challenging yet supportive, collaborative, fair and honest, and most importantly a safe place to try, fail, and try again. Are there people who will NOT benefit from such an environment? I am thinking of the proposed new role of teachers as educational consultant to communities: making each community more supportive, a safe place to experiment, etc. Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Optimizing Knowledge Transfer
I mostly work with homeschooled parents and teachers from private or charter schools in the US. My hypothesis is that because this crowd is already spending a lot of energy on content and pedagogy innovations, they want their technology to be invisible and super-easy. I have not tried to reach out and recruit tech geeks specifically, but my population is already only 5-7% of the general, so multiplying that by another 5% of early adopters will leave me with a vanishing minority. Recently I recommended one of the most tech-savvy and adventurous of my local homeschool group to take a WE course. Well, I sent it to the group, the lady asked me about it and I confirmed the recommendation. She said the amount of technical content, rather than pedagogy, was something she did not expect and did not like. In her words: I thought we would talk about particular interesting ways to teach with wikis, student projects and the like. But we talked about editing itself most of the time. She did begin using a wiki for her next project with students, so overall the goal of capacity increase can be said to be reached; but her pick was a WYSIWYG platform, I believe. I recently had to choose a wiki for two of my math content development projects, since my earlier platform development efforts are on hold. I would love to do it on WE, because I love the community. But I tried WikiSpaces and now Curriki, and the copy-paste embed of widgets plus WYSIWIG made the decision for me. I don't see much community support on WikiSpaces (maybe I don't know where to look). Both WikiEducator and Curriki offer individual support for project organizers. What would happen if several hundred of people I plan to invite all needed individual technical support at once? This is the scenario I anticipate with any wiki syntax involved. My conclusion: WE is great for small, organic, person-by-person growth at the moment. A project involving large numbers of people together for a quick (wiki-wiki?) collaboration may find other platforms more inviting, unless they are specifically here for the wiki syntax training. For my part, I would like more potential group project leaders to focus on the growth of WE, and that's why I am working on organizing a WE presentation for the Math 2.0 interest group. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 5:23 AM, NELLIE DEUTSCH nellie.muller.deut...@gmail.com wrote: Paul, I have been working with K-12 teachers for over 30 years. I am always amazed by the ability of the Ministry of Education (Israel) to enforce innovations (including technology) irrespective of teachers' resistance, unions and other political groups. Educational policies and mandates seem to work. You may ask if this is a democratic way of doing things, but even the NCLB policy of 2001 was mandated in the US and is enforced in very undemocratic means. Warm wishes, Nellie Deutsch Sharing is Caring! --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Math 2.0 event
Hello, I started a page about the upcoming Math 2.0 event here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Math20Workshop#A_workshop_to_present_WikiEducator_to_the_Math_2.0_interest_group Gladys, Nellie, Randy, Sylvia, Patricia and Alison said they may be interested in hosting, organizing or attending it. Let's try and schedule it on a Saturday in October, some time when it's morning in the Americas and evening in Europe. I suggest 1pm Eastern US time. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Optimizing Knowledge Transfer
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 6:53 AM, Jan Visser jvis...@learndev.org wrote: This makes much sense to me, Maria, and I agree that, while attention to familiarity with wiki syntax is an important entry point for the WE platform, it is no more than just that. I would love to see increased interest emerge in issues pertaining to questions about how we learn and how we help other people learn, including through teaching, when it can’t be avoided, but preferably through a wider variety of means and contexts. Jan As an exercise, I spent five years never using the word teaching other than quoting literature. I highly recommend the exercise, which also works in shorter stretches of time, for anyone involved in helping others make sense of the world, create and join communities, or otherwise develop. Wiki and Ning are two platforms most suitable for community learning projects at the moment. They are open enough to support various community practices, and (with some platforms) easy to use with various embeddable social objects from other sites, in the web as a platform approach. The notion of a social object is extremely important for this conversation, yet almost nobody knows what it even is... Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Optimizing Knowledge Transfer
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 8:20 AM, Jan Visser jvis...@learndev.org wrote: I can’t agree more and have indeed been engaging quite consistently in the same practice that you mention. At the time I was in charge of Learning Without Frontiers at UNESCO (during the 1990s) my team members and I also made it a point not to mention the word ‘education’ and any words with the same root, but emphasize ‘learning’ instead. One must be careful, though. I often see references now to ‘distance learning’ instead of ‘distance education’ as if the simple substitution of a word would change the practice. In fact, ‘distance learning’ is a misnomer. You don’t learn at a distance. You learn where you are as part of the network within which you partake and which serves you as an environment for the sharing of learning experiences. ‘Distance education’ is the more proper term, but it does reflect the underlying assumptions of its practice, which are not too remote, despite claims to the contrary, from those conditioning traditional f2f schooling models. Much work is still needed to bring about real change. Jan Spatial metaphors and language based on them become less and less directly meaningful these days. Web as a platform makes the term web SITE a misnomer. The last few sites I made have entities hosted on a dozen different platforms: videos, aggregator searches, pictures, link collections, feeds... In what sense is such a collection a site? However, we are probably hard-wired to think and especially to remember in terms of space, which comes, as a biologist friend recently explained, from hunter-gatherer needs to find minimal paths toward the optimal food. So people talk about being together or close when they mean a purely time-based phenomenon, such as a live webinar! Or people feel like neighbors if they interact (meet) in several different communities. Science and practices of networks will probably depend on spatial metaphors for a long time. The distance learning phrase isn't meaningful as a metaphor for what people aim to accomplish, though. Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Optimizing Knowledge Transfer
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Maria, Really appreciate your reflections on the initial barriers (real or perceived) relating to WYSIWYG editing. I suspect that once we implement Rich Text Editing in WikiEducator we'll see our community grow even more :-). In my view technology should not be a barrier to collaboration. The data we have with reference to wiki skills and training is interesting: - 45% of all educators who register for voluntary training through the Learning4Content training initiative achieve a wiki certification. - 62% of these educators achieve the levels of competence required for developing OER in the Mediawiki environment. - 64% of our users confirm that WikiEducator is the first wiki account they have created - 70% of our users confirm that they have joined wikieducator to learn wiki skills and to develop OER. You can read the full report on the L4C project here: http://wikieducator.org/images/a/ac/L4C_Report_Aug09.pdf Wayne, This discussion is immensely useful for me, in light of the future projects. Thank you for the comments! This report shows great success in terms of WikiEducator's stated goals of capacity, community (connections) and content. It works, it works! When thinking about community and OER productivity, the website stats are also interesting. In the case of Curriki the three month average on Alexa records 2.14 page views per users spending 2.9 minutes on the site. In the case of WikiEducator we have recorded a three month average of 8 page views per user and an average of 21.8 minutes on the site. I suppose you could argue that the wiki syntax requires users to spend more time on WE :-). I will argue that WikiEducator has a tighter, more action-oriented community with fewer people just checking the site out because they saw it mentioned in their networks, or otherwise being onlookers. I think it is the direct result of publicity strategies. Some communities invite a lot of people to check them out, and some to collaborate and work together. The later type will have stickier page data and other community measures showing that people actually work there. I'm not sure whether I agree with the analysis that projects involving large numbers of people for quick (wiki-wiki?) collaboration would be more successful using other platforms. Wikipedia is a case in point. I'd like to look, again, at the degree of collaboration, maybe using a scale similar to Shirky's sharing-collaboration-community action. A project synchronized in time, where all participants pledge (register) to spend hours a week working is different from the slight participation Wikipedia invites (though some people undoubtedly spend tens of hours a week contributing). L4C projects have dedicated time, but then people go there to learn wiki skills. The consideration of content vs. tech skills is very important, as I learned from that Family Multiplication Study pilot I did, where many people felt that the platform development and the resulting lack of ease was too much. Retrospectively, it almost felt like a bait and switch - the project being advertised as a content project, while so much of it was devoted to technology. As a result, I am being extra careful this time around, both with descriptions of what is involved technologically, and with choices of project tools that have a potential to tip the scales toward learning the technology and away from developing math content. This may be a mere dream for any current platform, but one can hope - here are the numbers I just made up that I would like to see: - 90% of the project's time to be about content, with the rest being the slight, casual attention to easy 2.0 tools and personal communication within the community - 100% of registered people contribute to OER creation weekly - 85% saying they learned new web 2.0 tools without meaning to, or realizing it Maybe I just want users who have been through your wiki training? :-) Cheers, Maria Droujkova Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: rant
I think both growth and competition views can be situated within cognitive or social or ecological perspectives. I'd like to see the middle way integrating them, naturally, but I am not sure if the ecological perspective by itself is the third way, or if it's a meta-entity. Cheers, MariaD On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Jan Visserjvis...@learndev.org wrote: Both these views of learning are based on the assumption of individuals as autonomous entities rather than as integral parts of a (learning) ecology: enlightenment of the self (to compete with one’s previous individual self) or competition with others (to reposition the self vis-à-vis other individual selves). I don’t buy either. A more positive view of learning recognizes its quality as a lifelong disposition to become better and better at interacting constructively with one’s environment, i.e. to become a better integrated part of the whole, a more harmonious part of the universe. Jan --- Check out Learners in a Changing Learning Landscape at http://www.learndev.org/learnland2008.html Jan Visser, Ph.D. President Sr. Researcher, Learning Development Institute E-mail: jvis...@learndev.org Fax (France): +33-9-505-97347 Fax and voice messages via Internet: North America: +1-928-569-7978 Europe: +44-705-360-3517 Phone: North America: +1-904-425-1625 France: +33-4-902-49275 France Mobile: +33-6-869-86300 (new since April 12, 2009)) Netherlands: +31-344-605243 Netherlands Mobile: +31-6-429-05944 Check out: http://www.learndev.org Blog: http://jvisser-ldi.blogspot.com/ From: wikieducator@googlegroups.com [mailto:wikieduca...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Maria Droujkova Sent: Friday, August 28, 2009 3:05 PM To: wikieducator@googlegroups.com Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: rant I don't know where is a good place to answer your rants, Phil, so here it goes. It related to the idea of growth vs. conflict, which came up in recent discussion with Jatinder Singh Barhey about learning game development. Here is a quote: Jatinder: A person learns only in two circumstances: 1. When you really want to learn for yourself – Self Enlightenment 2. When you want to prove yourself – Competition I have tried to think of any third situation but never got convinced that there lies a third situation. So, believe it or not competition based learning is about 50% as responsible for learning in human beings as anything else. May be Competition is not the right word. Thiagi (one of the pioneers in game based learning) uses the word “Conflict” for the same. Maria: I would agree on the two learning circumstances. I think of them as Growth and Conflict, with competition belonging to the conflict category. Game mechanics can be based on Growth/Enlightenment, though people can ALWAYS switch categories personally and compete with themselves in situations set up for growth, or refuse to pay attention to the competition while playing competitive games. ~*~*~*~*~* Phil, I see your gardening view of education as more peaceful and cooperative, whereas the industrial transfer models are more competitive and conflict-oriented. Also, I think the term edupunk is somehow relevant to the conversation, but I can't quite express the connection in words. http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/edupunk Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 8:28 AM, Phil Bartle cmpbar...@gmail.com wrote: Phil's latest rant is about education and the agricultural revolution See: http://wikieducator.org/User:Philbartle#Phil.27s_Rants --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: rant
I don't know where is a good place to answer your rants, Phil, so here it goes. It related to the idea of growth vs. conflict, which came up in recent discussion with Jatinder Singh Barhey about learning game development. Here is a quote: Jatinder: A person learns only in two circumstances: 1. When you really want to learn for yourself – Self Enlightenment 2. When you want to prove yourself – Competition I have tried to think of any third situation but never got convinced that there lies a third situation. So, believe it or not competition based learning is about 50% as responsible for learning in human beings as anything else. May be Competition is not the right word. Thiagi (one of the pioneers in game based learning) uses the word “Conflict” for the same. Maria: I would agree on the two learning circumstances. I think of them as Growth and Conflict, with competition belonging to the conflict category. Game mechanics can be based on Growth/Enlightenment, though people can ALWAYS switch categories personally and compete with themselves in situations set up for growth, or refuse to pay attention to the competition while playing competitive games. ~*~*~*~*~* Phil, I see your gardening view of education as more peaceful and cooperative, whereas the industrial transfer models are more competitive and conflict-oriented. Also, I think the term edupunk is somehow relevant to the conversation, but I can't quite express the connection in words. http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/edupunk Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 8:28 AM, Phil Bartle cmpbar...@gmail.com wrote: Phil's latest rant is about education and the agricultural revolution See: http://wikieducator.org/User:Philbartle#Phil.27s_Rants --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Virtual Field Trip: WikiEducator + seminar
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:15 PM, Patricia Schlichtpschli...@col.org wrote: Hi Maria, Sylvia and Gladys, If you allow me to suggest, why don’t you host the event on WIZIQ.com but work from a WikiEducator page. You can set up a project page and transparently hold all discussions for others to join in when they want to. For our Learning4Content workshops as you know we use the Google Groups discussion forum. It is easy to set up a new group and the link you can embed into your Wiki project page including participants list etc. Patricia, WiZiQ was the platform Nellie suggested originally. My only concern is the blurb on the site that says recordings are erased after a month. Is it true? Is there a way to keep them forever? Cheers, Maria D Have a look here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Learning4Content/Registration how it is done. You could use Doodle.com to run a poll what time is convenient for everyone. Cheers, Patricia --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Virtual Field Trip: WikiEducator + seminar
These are great news! A couple of weeks ago, Nellie and I discussed a WE field trip for the Math 2.0 interest group, meeting (virtually) every Wednesday 9pm EST (http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events). I know Gladys is especially interested in mathematics education, as well. Maybe we can organize such as field trip, among SCoPE, WE and Math 2.0 people? We can use any webinar venue, as long as it keeps session recordings forever (or makes them available for downloading to your server). Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:44 AM, Sylvia Currie sylvia.cur...@gmail.comwrote: Hi everyone, Apologies if I'm duplicating information already posted to this forum. I just want to make sure you're aware of the upcoming 3-week seminar in SCoPE facilitated by Nellie Deutsch and Gladys Gahona: Collaborative Projects on WikiEducator http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/forum/view.php?id=2291 We are launching this seminar and also a new Virtual Field Trips project organized in partnership with CPSquare (http://cpsquare.org) with a Virtual Field Trip to WikiEducator. Randy Fisher will take us on a guided tour and discussion about WikiEducator on August 10 at 22:00 GMT in Elluminate (http://tinyurl.com/c7vspl). Notes about these events are being developed here: http://www.wikieducator.org/SCoPE Randy tells me that many people find out about WikiEducator through presentations, so I hope these activities we have planned will help to spread the word about the many opportunities to work together See you there! Sylvia Currie BCcampus Online Communities --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Learning by Doing
On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:55 AM, Kwaakumacsvis...@gmail.com wrote: I am informed that the West Africa WikiEducators' regional chapter with secretariat at the University of Education, Winneba in Ghana is active, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Do others see the sub- Sahara Africa situation through similar lenses as mine or probably I am expecting too much from these countries? The issues have either been lack of Internet access or slow connectivity but the situation is changing fast with improved facilities. Prince Obiri-Mainoo Check out XO laptops and Sugar on a Stick that works with them and many other computers. They mesh into local networks without internet access, and then you can carry some of the materials produced, on the USB stick, to where connectivity exists. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org Cheers, Maria Droujkova http://www.naturalmath.com Make math your own, to make your own math. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Success! - Hewlett Funding Proposal Approved
Congratulations Great job! Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath subscribe now to discuss future math culture with parents, researchers and techies http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/ Math 2.0 interest group home http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Well done WE! - NZ Ministry of Education project
Congratulations Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath subscribe now to discuss future math culture with parents, researchers and techies http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 5:02 PM, Wayne Mackintoshmackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Everyone, Good news for our community. The New Zealand Ministry of Education has signed off on a project to establish a national OER collaboration for New Zealand schools using WikiEducator. The project aims to: Build capability and support community development for NZ teachers working on OER. Make the wiki easier to use for all teachers for authoring, searching, and reusing OER content. Seed the development of OER exemplars mapped to the NZ curriculum. The New Zealand Ministry of Education has agreed to fund the first year of the project outlined in this proposal: http://wikieducator.org/Funding_proposals/Reusable_and_portable_content_for_New_Zealand_schools. I'd like to encourage all WikiEducator teachers to take a look at the proposal and see how we may be able to replicate national OER collaborations in your respective countries. All our planning documentation and resources will naturally be licensed under free content licenses, which you can reuse and adpat for your local context :-). Similarly all tools developed will be freely available for adoption and use by all WikiEducators. Well done WikiEducator --- another natioinal OER initiave for our community! Cheers Wayne (Note there are a few minor tweaks on the budget allocations which must still be updated in the wiki.) -- Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D. Director, International Centre for Open Education, Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand. Board of Directors, OER Foundation. Founder and Community Council Member, Wikieducator, www.wikieducator.org Mobile +64 21 2436 380 Skype: WGMNZ1 Twitter: OERFoundation, Mackiwg --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: An Experiment
How is it different from the functionality Skype provides? Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath subscribe now to discuss future math culture with parents, researchers and techies http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 10:25 PM, simonfj simo...@cols.com.au wrote: Guys,, I'd like to invite you to take part in an experiment which might begin to bridge the digital divide, or at least the divide between the old telephone system and IP networks. The main thing I'd like to think we could acheive, in the first instance, is coming up with a telephone (conferencing) number which we could all use to talk to one another at the cost of a local call. The aim is to build a global collaboration network using tools which are already there. http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/about.jsp We wil want to build this from the bottom up, and in Australia this is the bottom. http://www.arcs.org.au/products-services/collaboration-services/video/evo/telephone-bridge-phone You'll see (at the bottom of the page) that there are already some 'telephone bridge numbers' for different countries. I'm hoping we might be able to add a few more, depending on your locality. I'm pretty sure that this won't be too much of a leap for the people in your institution which work with these kind of tools, You only need to tell them that you'd like to tap in to an EVO meeting by dialing a local telephone number. That's step 1. If we can get this far, and you ask your techs to contact arcs and add your local number to the international list, we can all get some idea of the power of WE. (Phone Bridge doc is at the bottom of page) From there WE'd want to have a dedicated global 24/7 conference number which I'd suggest would be 94533 (wikied), and, if I see the list grow, I'll stay on caltech's case untli WE have it. That's step 2. There's a bit more work, and learning, to do for all of us in order to take it to step 3, where we have a virtual room numbered 94533 in which we can do all sorts of things. This sounds a bit convoluted I know, but it gives us an opportunity to turn a few institutional heads that are unaccustomed to building (industrial strength) solutions for global communities. We have to start somewhere. regards, simonfj PS I'd also be interested to see if you have any problems registering for ARCS 'FORUMS'. (andrew is the contact). --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Options for Activity Template
I have some learning design experience, and I would be interested in learning more from others. I just added my name there. I have an embarrassingly basic question to ask. How will I know what happens in that group? I added the page to my watchlist. Is there a way to get email notifications when something happens to the watchlist? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath future math culture email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 6:24 PM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Glady's, Glad to have you on the team! I've just set up a work group page here: http://www.wikieducator.org/Workgroup:Learning_design Feel free to add you name to the list. If you haven't done so yet -- you may want to add the learning design userbox on your userpage -- see: http://www.wikieducator.org/Template:User_Learning_Designer Cheers Wayne --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Fwd: On Classroom 2.0: Our New Beginner Webinar Series Starts with Wikis
These seminars typically draw pretty large (over a hundred) crowds. Somebody from WE may want to contact Steve and Sue for some sort of collaboration or mentioning WE, unless you have already done so. It's neat the series starts with wikis. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath math authoring for kids email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations -- Forwarded message -- From: Classroom 2.0 m...@classroom20.com Date: Wed, May 13, 2009 at 1:48 AM Subject: On Classroom 2.0: Our New Beginner Webinar Series Starts with Wikis To: droujk...@gmail.com droujk...@gmail.com A message to all members of Classroom 2.0 An exciting new Classroom 2.0 webinar series for beginners will kick off on Wednesday, May 13 at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT. The first set will be a three-part series Go Wild with Wikis and will be hosted on Elluminate and facilitated by Sue Waters, Edublogs Community Facilitator. In the first session Sue will take you on a guided tour of what are wikis, why educators use wikis, and how to use wikis for their own professional learning and/or with their students. In future sessions you will gradually learn step-by-step details about the different features of a Wikispaces wiki including how to set it up, manage it and add content. While our beginner series focus is helping educators new to web technologies learn more about how they can use these tools with their students it will also provide 'takeaways' for the more experienced users. All sessions will be recorded and archived at http://live.classroom20.com/. We hope you will join us! Steve Steve Hargadon Founder, Classroom 2.0 www.stevehargadon.com st...@hargadon.com Visit Classroom 2.0 at: http://www.classroom20.com --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: On Classroom 2.0: Our New Beginner Webinar Series Starts with Wikis
Update: Randy's on it. On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 12:16 PM, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: These seminars typically draw pretty large (over a hundred) crowds. Somebody from WE may want to contact Steve and Sue for some sort of collaboration or mentioning WE, unless you have already done so. It's neat the series starts with wikis. -- Forwarded message -- From: Classroom 2.0 m...@classroom20.com Date: Wed, May 13, 2009 at 1:48 AM Subject: On Classroom 2.0: Our New Beginner Webinar Series Starts with Wikis To: droujk...@gmail.com droujk...@gmail.com A message to all members of Classroom 2.0 An exciting new Classroom 2.0 webinar series for beginners will kick off on Wednesday, May 13 at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT. The first set will be a three-part series Go Wild with Wikis and will be hosted on Elluminate and facilitated by Sue Waters, Edublogs Community Facilitator. In the first session Sue will take you on a guided tour of what are wikis, why educators use wikis, and how to use wikis for their own professional learning and/or with their students. In future sessions you will gradually learn step-by-step details about the different features of a Wikispaces wiki including how to set it up, manage it and add content. While our beginner series focus is helping educators new to web technologies learn more about how they can use these tools with their students it will also provide 'takeaways' for the more experienced users. All sessions will be recorded and archived at http://live.classroom20.com/. We hope you will join us! Steve Steve Hargadon Founder, Classroom 2.0 www.stevehargadon.com st...@hargadon.com Visit Classroom 2.0 at: http://www.classroom20.com --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Community update - WikiEducator, OER Foundation etc.
Are there studies on what populations prefer one way or another? I suspect it depends on personal technology history and general programming experience. In my very limited experience, most programmers prefer wiki code and most people without other programming experience prefer WYSIWYG. I also suspect it depends on whether people like keyboard shortcuts in general, or use menus with their mice. People who like to click on icons are probably less likely to prefer typing code to make something bold or italic. How do you experienced wiki teachers help someone already knowing WYSIWYG text editors and wanting to learn wiki code? My first instinct is to teach wiki code as programming behind WYSIWYG first - that's how you program bold, that's how you program titles, and then - that's how you do cool new things only wiki code lets you do, such as inclusions. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath math authoring for kids email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 1:54 AM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Nellie, I agree -- personally I prefer editing using wiki syntax. The ability to edit in both ways (i.e. WYSIWYG and wiki syntax) would need to be specified as a requirement. Currently te FCKeditor extension for Mediawiki enables authors to edit using standard wiki text. We need to research the implications of setting the default choice in user preferences. Rest assured -- we'll keep the WE family posted with proper consultation. This would also have implications for our training support which we'll need to factor into the plans. Cheers Wayne 2009/5/12 NELLIE DEUTSCH nellie.muller.deut...@gmail.com Wayne and Maria, I would to be able to edit in both ways, if WE decides to add WYSIWYG. Thank you. Warm wishes, Nellie Deutsch Doctoral Student Educational Leadership Curriculum and Instruction You are invited to join educators for a free 5-day online workshop on how to integrate technology into the classroom and collaborate with educators around the world: http://www.wikieducator.org/EL4C25/Register On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Maria, I'm very excited about the new prospects for WE. We have a solid foundations to take our project to new levels -- and you're right, WE is an amazing community! I'm glad you found our open proposal useful for your own grant writing process --- by sharing we reduce duplication of effort and make a small contribution to sustainability and more effective utilisation of scarce resources in education. Pioneered by the Shuttleworth foundation and the compelling insights of Mark Surman -- Open Philanthropy makes a lot of sense -- the concept of open sourcing philanthropy is very powerful. Take a look at how the Shuttleworth foundation have implemented the concepts (See: http://tinyurl.com/p3pvft ). I'm keen for us at WE to build on these experiences. Always interested in collobarting -- thanks for the offer re WYSIWYG editing. Let's explore this further. The FCKeditor extension for Mediawiki has matured over the last couple of months --- particularly with the activity and contributions from Wikia. Once we've migrated to our Phase 2 hosting solution, the next step is to seriously research the implementation of a rich text editing solution for WE -- along with the development and refinement in our policy guidelines for new technologies. I think WYSIWYG will potentially lower the barriers of entry for many educators -- there have been numerous requests for WYSIWYG editing from our community -- let's see if we can respond appropriately :-). Cheers Wayne 2009/5/11 Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com Wayne, These are all great news. I am so happy for you and WE! It's a great community. I would like to thank you for opening your proposal building process. I am working on an SBIR grant for Natural Math for the Family Studies supporting software I discussed on the list earlier, and your proposal is quite helpful. I will be happy to share ours if you think it would be of use to others. Speaking of which, our wiki parts have a WYSIWYG editor that works pretty well, including picture upload and inserting widgets (e.g. youtube video). If it would help your efforts to collaborate on this or other parts of your endeavors, please let me know. On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 10:32 PM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, At last -- a long overdue update. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum
[WikiEducator] Re: Community update - WikiEducator, OER Foundation etc.
Wayne, These are all great news. I am so happy for you and WE! It's a great community. I would like to thank you for opening your proposal building process. I am working on an SBIR grant for Natural Math for the Family Studies supporting software I discussed on the list earlier, and your proposal is quite helpful. I will be happy to share ours if you think it would be of use to others. Speaking of which, our wiki parts have a WYSIWYG editor that works pretty well, including picture upload and inserting widgets (e.g. youtube video). If it would help your efforts to collaborate on this or other parts of your endeavors, please let me know. On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 10:32 PM, Wayne Mackintosh mackintosh.wa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi everyone, At last -- a long overdue update. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath math authoring for kids email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Offline Wikieducator mirrors and slices
On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 12:23 AM, David Leeming leem...@pipolfastaem.gov.sb wrote: What I am wondering about is having an offline mirror or a slice of the wikieducator (a read only snapshot on DVD that could maybe be updated every few months and received by mail). This will great aid the searching of teachers, and open it up to the students - it's simply impracticable for 40 students in a class to access the Internet through a slow (64-128kbps) link, especially as others may also be online. So we need an offline snapshop. The teachers can find quiet times to work online on collaborative development of content etc. I do think the Wikipedia has been released on DVD at times. So why not the WE? I think WE on a flash drive might also be a great idea. It would obviously be a cut down version. In fact the OLPC has collections including a small slice of the Wikipedia on Chemistry that can be installed permanently on the XO, despite the meagre memory. David Leeming Technical Advisor, People First Network, Honiara, Solomon Islands Wikieducator User page: http://wikieducator.org/User:Leeming Alt. Email: da...@leeming-consulting.com David, This is a great idea. So far, I am thinking of two areas of design that may make it stronger: There are probably other necessary items, but this is a start. 1 - Navigation help. Tags, tables of contents, workshops on wiki-thinking (searching over top-down hierarchies) that will help teachers find relevant stuff. 2 - Two-way updates. Again and again, research on communities of practice shows that feeling welcome to contribute is crucial. Most people never use the opportunity, but the reply button or, in the case of wiki, the edit button has to be there. So, there is a need to find ways of sending back a slice of WE created by your locals. Both areas have a technical side, such as figuring out integration issues, and a community side, such as ways to energize, support, and educate people using local sandboxes only. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://groups.google.com/group/naturalmath our email group http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Keep the architecture open for bells and whistles
Thank you very much for the reply. This content checker is a fascinating idea that seems doable, and your site is a great resource. On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 1:14 PM, jkelly952 jkelly...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Content in most subject areas in primary and secondary school is fixed. How it is developed is not. Your “subjective and contested” is referring to the “how”, and not the “what”. Not all schools and homeschools use the same fixed content, though. To use American examples only, Key Curriculum materials, Hawaii Measure Up, the Life of Fred series, A Beka series, or Saxon Math are pretty different from one another not only in how, but also in what. For a particular topic example, some curricula include sizable amounts of early algebra and others do not have any whatsoever. If we look at other countries, well, the differences are even larger. Moreover, with distance and virtual learning becoming more available, there is more and more variety and customization in scope and sequence. How can a content checker support this variety? A “content checker” captures the “what and how” to provide a utility that acts like a “spell checker”. The “content checker” is activated when a user directly (or indirectly as the system becomes more sophisticated) tells it the language being used, subject area and learners age (or age range). For example, a developer typing in English is working on a mathematics lesson for a seven year old. This information will activate the checker. The developer is typing away and puts the words “natural number” in the lesson. Like a “spell checker” the “content checker” will highlight the words “natural number”. The developer using their mouse will right click on the highlighted words, and a menu will open. The “content checker” will caution the developer that this term is not normally part of the vocabulary of a 7 year old mathematics learner. The checker may suggest the words “whole number” or “counting number” maybe more appropriate for this age level. The checker will also provide links to places like WE’s mathematics glossary and links to other prepared lessons which may help the developer understand why the term “natural number” is not used. A “content checker” need not be activated for a negative reason, but just to provide useful links and information. I am not aware of any publicly available system, because “content checkers” require the accumulation of a lot of information on a lot of different publishers’ works. Sharing collected information is not profitable, so most of these systems stay in-house. The type of collected information is like that on my website www.k-12math.info . Jim Kelly http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Jkelly952 --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: the power of less
John, This is an excellent tutorial! It will really help those who are committed to a large projects using wikis, or any other mark-up language for that matter. I think it's useful mostly to people who already remember a large chunk of the syntax by heart, though. For those who do not remember the wiki syntax yet, learning will be delayed by removing the immediate feedback loop of clicking preview - unless I missed some easy way for feedback loops. So, this tutorial is an intermediate step, for those already in some relatively involved wiki-projects. The power of less conversation applies mostly to beginners, in my mind - people not yet committed to using wikis, and trying to check it all out and decide. Thanks again for the tutorial - I will definitely use it. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:25 AM, john stampe jwsta...@yahoo.com wrote: Hi, folks. I just put on wikieducator a help article on editing wiki doing it my favourite way - with a text editor. Its here http://www.wikieducator.org/Help:Editing_using_a_text_editor However, it could use your help in three ways: 1. I run Linux and therefore am not familiar with text editors for windows and Mac (other than ports of Unix editors). These editors should be included. 2. I usually use emacs not vim (please no flame wars). So the section on vim probably could be improved 3. If you favorite editor is not listed, please add it. Happy editing, John --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Keep the architecture open for bells and whistles
Jim, Can you make a few examples of the manual content checkers being developed? Isn't age appropriateness very subjective and contested? On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 12:16 PM, jkelly952 jkelly...@sbcglobal.net wrote: Manual “content checkers” exist and are being developed, it is only a matter of time when the people who brought us the “spell checker” will have the enlightening moment and create “content checkers”. Jim Kelly http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Jkelly952 -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: the power of less
There is a fun presentation about game mechanics in serious applications, called Building a princess saving app: http://lostgarden.com/Mixing_Games_and_Applications.pdf It has learning curves for typical games and apps. According to the author, the learning curve for a typical application is roughly exponential. Here is a quote: Notice it takes a while to build up competent skills in a traditional app. There is so much complexity that comes from feature piled on top of feature, it is easy to get confused. You can spend 12 months gaining a basic level of competence in Photoshop. But the good news is that there is a life time worth of depth. This initial period of learning is very frustrating. You lose massive numbers of users. I took 3 years to learn Photoshop on my own. The basic metaphor just made no sense to me when I used the trial. In this modern world where apps need people to pick them, up try them out and fall in love, this long learning curve is often the kiss of death for a new company. Then it compares other learning curves - web 2.0 little apps, web 2.0 big apps, and games. I find it so fascinating I printed it out and put it on my wall of awesome. We have to face the fact that for most people, at this point in history, learning wiki syntax from scratch to create their own simple pages is the kiss of death for participation. What WE is doing with classes is changing this fact, because people are willing to go to greater lengths of learning in a class. People already expect exponential learning curves in classes - they expect to plow through tough, non-intuitive content. However, consider this: I can invite a random person into a Google Doc and they never complain about their inability to contribute. In fact, I typically observe them being active as soon as they register. This is not a picture I see inviting people to non-WYSIWYG pages. Simple is also social. For example, (simple)=(frequently used): People use applications like MS Word for text editing because these programs are already widespread. They probably receive Word documents in email and observe everybody else use it. Everybody drives in the USA, so it's simple, but I remember eighties in Russia when driving was considered very complex, courses took forever, and women in general were considered all but incapable of learning the skill. There used to be typists, and typing was considered a complex skill worthy of being a profession. Now babies start learning to type before they start learning to walk. My own conclusion: I only work with WYSIWYG wikies for projects I organize. I join other people's projects involving wiki syntax, since I already know it. I feel shy, given the years of courses in programming and CS, to confess I had issues and unpleasantness learning wiki syntax, but it's true. I see no reason to teach people wiki syntax until they want to do things beyond typing words and making them bold or italic - things like creating templates or working with includes. Non-programmers in general tend to select the highest-order, most object-oriented tools they can lay their hands on that still fulfills their goals. So, if I want people to learn wiki syntax, my projects better demand some actions beyond typing words, making headings, inserting pictures. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 5:59 AM, john stampe jwsta...@yahoo.com wrote: The problem that I have with people who talk about the power of less or WYSIWYG is how ironic the statements are if you look at real life. In another thread somebody mentioned that they had problems getting unversity lecturers to learn wiki syntax. Yet I have seen the same type of people going to the library or bookstore to get a book on how to use MS Word, despite the fact they will use only a small number of its features. Many people use word processors to write simple text. Yet it would be much simpler to use a text editor - where you can concentrate on the important part, what you say. Or for another example, take Liquid Threads. How many complaints have their been in this mailing list? (Indeed, the was the first topic I saw after I joined the list) It maybe simple, but does it work? In conclusion, my postition could be summed up by Einsteins comment: everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. From: Scott Newson scott.g.new...@gmail.com To: wikieducator@googlegroups.com Sent: Monday, April 6, 2009 12:12:37 PM Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: the power of less The thing with technology is that 'less' is very subjective. Tools that lessen the cognitive load on the user often have a lot of though put into them by their designers who consider them more complex than a similar tool that requires a lot from the user. With the example of a WYSIWYG editor, those of us who
[WikiEducator] Re: L4C is making history! - We need your help
Grats to WE and all of us individually! I sent information on in Twitter, my mailing list, and emailed some friends who may be interested. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Non Formal Education discussion
Phil, I think I missed some part of this discussion - maybe you can direct me to where it's captured... Who's organizing the conference, when, where? On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 2:05 AM, Phil Bartle cmpbar...@gmail.com wrote: I am grateful to all those who made positive comments on this listserv about my apprehension concerning an on line disucssion about non formal education. They have encouraged me to continue with the endeavor. But I can not do it alone; I need help. Please, could you make your comments and suggestions on the page that I have been developing? See: http://www.wikieducator.org/Non_Formal_Education_Online_Conference#Discussion_on_Non_Formal_Education Cheers, Phil -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Non Formal Education *NFE discussion
Phil, when people are done with the technical discussion, and if you are still interested, I am a radical unschooler in real life and I can probably play this ball with you. I have connections in unschoolers' circles. My pedagogical interest is in mathematics. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Phil Bartle cmpbar...@gmail.com wrote: I am thinking about backing out of this endeavor. I started it as a result of the L4C course I took where there appeared to be enthusiasm for the idea. My own interest is in Functional Literacy, deschooling society and the like, from reading Ivan Illich and Paulo Friere in the sixties. No one from the class has picked up the ball. The discussions on this listserv went into technical areas that confound me. I know my material and I am an experienced teacher, but I simply do not have the I technology to carry this myself. If the coach does the pushups, The athlete will not get stronger Community Empowerment: www.scn.org/cmp/ WikiEducator http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Philbartle Join our discusssion forum http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Community_Strengthening == 1 of 1 == Date: Sun, Mar 15 2009 7:23 am From: valerie Hi Phil How about a question of the week here? Do you have specific topics to get some interaction and feedback? Do you want to ask specific questions to help populate sections of your outline? http://www.wikieducator.org/Non_Formal_Education_Online_Conference Reading through the information and the comments, all sorts of questions come to mind for me. The topics vs. skills issue is interesting, for example. How formal is non-formal education? Are there specific learning outcomes? Who sets those? Does this have to be decided or known to address the other topics? ..Valerie --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Twitter
On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Alison Ruth alisonr...@gmail.com wrote: Hey Randy An overview of twitter is available here - http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter And of course you can follow them - http://twitter.com/CommonCraft As for who else to follow, well, the sky's the limit (not quite, there's only about 6 million people on twitter). Start with a local search on your town's name. Does anyone else have some suggestions? Sure, follow me http://twitter.com/MariaDroujkova :-))) Seriously, it may be a good idea for those of us here who do use Twitter to exchange our names there. As to how to find people - do use your email export feature, and then just search for your web heroes. Chances are, they got Twitter. Also, we can start using a hashtag while talking about Wiki Educator. I suggest #WikiEducator :-) Alison On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Randy Fisher wikira...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, For those of us, that are Twitter-luddites, how and who do we follow, on Twitter Thanks, - Randy On Sat, Mar 7, 2009 at 8:32 AM, William Allen williamjuliusal...@gmail.com wrote: P.S. I just tweeted the purpose and address of the wiki; might get more to take a look -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Flexible Learning course starts soon
Do you need to register, or just show up? On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 10:16 PM, Leigh Blackall leighblack...@gmail.comwrote: http://flexible-learning-course.blogspot.com/ A free and open course on flexible learning starts March 16, using the wikieducator resource: http://wikieducator.org/Flexible_learning -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Non Formal Education (NFE) Discussion
Some models and communities you probably don't want to miss: Communities of practice, apprenticeships Massively Multiplayer Games and the huge amount of learning happening within them Homeschoolers, especially unschoolers On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 10:08 PM, Phil Bartle cmpbar...@gmail.com wrote: I would like to see an online discussion about non formal education (NFE). After some discussions with some of the participants in the L4C Tutorial I was in, I put together an outline and purpose page. I do not know about the mechanics of such a conference, but I was impressed by our tutors, Patricia and Nellie, during our online discussion sessions of the course. Please take a look at what I have so far drafted, and add your ideas and experience. http://www.wikieducator.org/Non_Formal_Education_Online_Conference#Discussion_on_Non_Formal_Education Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: school wikipedia
I think it's a really bad idea. It kills many key ideals of Wikipedia in general and wikis in particular. For example, it makes students consumers rather than creators of content, and removes any possibility of current relevance and constant updating of the information. It also re-institutes the division into experts and everybody else. On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Wong Leo leolao...@gmail.com wrote: http://schools-wikipedia.org/ -- Leo Wong -- http://helpsuzhou.blogbus.com/ HELP -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Active Membership on WE
Connect to Twitter and have faster connections and events. Have projects that people can join. I am still committed to the math dictionary project, but had some issues with math clubs (snow, etc.) that prevented us from uploading definitions - we started, though. Some quests and goals, in other words. On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:07 AM, NELLIE DEUTSCH nellie.muller.deut...@gmail.com wrote: Thank you. I would like further suggestions on how to sustain active members. Warm wishes, Nellie Deutsch Doctoral Student Educational Leadership Curriculum and Instruction http://www.wikieducator.org/EL4C19 http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Nelliemuller skype:nelliedeutschmuller -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: new OER online-only university
I am thinking of an economic model where resources that don't require human support - lecture tapes, class notes, problems and solutions, software - are free, but there may be associated human services that are neither mandatory, nor free. Isn't it like MIT, though? You can get all their stuff online free, but services such as participatory learning with live students and professors, or being graded on your tests, are not free (nor easily accessible, for that matter - the price of entry is steep in time and effort). Do you know of more good (non-evil) examples of using this economic model? On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 3:51 AM, john stampe jwsta...@yahoo.com wrote: I agree with you Nellie, looking around on the web including the website and at the founders history, it looks as though he is in it as money making venture, rather than a serious educational effort. I am also bothered by the page on costs. First it says The University does not charge students to take classes, then it states Each course ends with a comprehensive examination for which students must pay a sliding scale exam fee. Those two statements are contradictory at best. Best regards, John P.S. I just had this thought. He (the founder) was previously head of a test preparation company (Kidum) which was sold to Kaplan. The model of charging for an exam I bet based on the model of SAT, ACT, GMAT, etc. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Nibipedia
A seemingly happy marriage between Youtube and Wikipedia: http://www.nibipedia.com Can it easily talk to other wikis? Hmmm, interesting possibilities, don't you think? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative
On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 6:39 PM, valerie vtay...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Maria Yes, my students are authoring learning materials - mostly as collaborative research projects http://www.wikieducator.org/DeAnza_College/CIS2/Fall_2008 http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Vtaylor/CIS2_Summer_2008 I would very much like to have access to some tools that would allow them to build out materials around hubs in a way that isn't linear wiki pages, but rather some more complex network / hub representation. I think the wiki structure, in and of itself, is quite wonderful for complex networks. The parent-child page creation promotes it, for example. Wikis are frequently used as an example of the structure contrasting with hierarchical, taxonomic ones. Ironically, a lot of people are drawn to simplistic structures in wiki authoring, due to psychological reasons. It makes the cognitive load lighter, basically, and wikis don't always have other tools for lowering cognitive loads in non-linear structures. What I am trying to say: let's figure out how to integrate WE with some of the tools we at Natural Math are building for helping communities navigate non-linear reusable learning object structures. The planet mapping specifically can be of use. I probably need to be talking with techie people about it. Planet can be a metaphor for a navigation/authoring system helping people aggregate and create wiki pages. Several people mentioned a need. This is very much in the early brainstorming stage. The idea being that these could be combined with the work of others. Then anyone interested in the topic would be guided around the learning space by these connections. Another use would be to enter the space with a specific link, then be able to see the connections and follow paths that went off from there. The general purpose Google search can do this sort of. If there is a link to a specific site in a page, you could search for other pages that contained that link. However, it doesn't address the idea that students are finding these paths as they learn and are the best source of this information. Capturing this information and then leveraging that in combination with many students' paths is important and interesting. I think the idea is similar to semantic web ideas: not a top-down static link farm, not a completely history-free search, but an integration of the two, through the community's actions of capturing their paths. Many people are working on this now. Wishing you the best for 2009 ..Valerie -- -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. http://www.naturalmath.com social math site http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Math gurus: Help needed :-)
Ok, here is what I will do. My various projects with people (math clubs, the family multiplication study, My young apprentice and such) are starting this and next week. We did make a resolution to do more community outreach with some of the people and projects. So, I will offer dictionary making and illustrating as an activity to everybody, which I will coordinate. The Examples part can be the divergent part I am talking about. I will describe the design of dictionary activities as we engage in them, so that other groups and individuals can do them, too. Leigh, I poked around the Wikibooks site you linked for a few minutes and could not find anything particularly useful for this project. Well, nowhere near the level of usefulness of math resources I would actually use, like Ask Dr. Math from the Math Forum, Jeany Eather's Maths Dictionary, Wolfram's Math World and Wikipedia. I could not see anything I would copy and paste if people allowed me - everything would require major re-writes. I also did not like the format of things I saw, at least not for a dictionary. I bet I am missing something. What did you have in mind? Gladys, who are other people and entities developing the dictionary, deciding the layout and ultimately using it - the we you mention? You gave a link to the project at some point, but it led to a big list of wiki projects, not to your particular one. Cheers, MariaD On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 2:14 AM, Gladys Gahona gladysgah...@gmail.comwrote: Maria, The current math glossary we are developing has been concibed to be a resource addressing to secondary and terciary level (13 to 18 yr) students. In this stage of developing, We have already defined the layout, consisting of : - Definition (s) - Supplementary definition (wikipedia) - Examples - External Links As the amount of defined terms grow, we easily will be able to cross- refence them. We have just started to fill in some definitions and extending invitations to the WE community to join the project. Anyone can add their favorite definitons, this means we may have several definitions for each item. So far the glossary contains mostly plain text. I agree Well-designed animations (better if interactive) may help students learn faster and easier. The good news are we can put all kind of media for exemplificating each term. e.g. still images, animated gifs, flash animations, interactive flash animations, collaborative videos (kaltura), audio, etc. The limit is our imagination and the availability of free media we can cater from the web or from the creativity of volunteer graphic/flash designers. I am certain You have and idea on how expensive a simple pedagogical animation could be for each term definition (money time). For example, please see http://www.wikieducator.org/MathGloss/A/Algebra. I authored the still image, and I easily could convert it to an animated gif, or even more... make a flash animation (not interactive). But it would take time and we are talking about only for one picture. We still don't have a math glossary for grades (K-6). Maybe you can lead the WE project, which will have its appropiate layout. I gladly could assist you if you decide to take the initiative. Don't worry about colors, we can make a colorfull and interactive resource for the kids. The divergent part of your vision of math glossary, fits perfectly with the wiki platform. In any case, we will need a growing collection of media (I love flash interactive animations), and a huge band of WikiEducators commited with the projects. They absolutely will give added value to any resource we develop for WE. We also count with a geek team in WE, who can solve all the technical issues we may face on the way to develop a well diferenciated and pedagogical resource for both levels. (a new glossary for kids and the existing one). Leigh has linked the math books collection alocated in Wikibooks. I personally like the Wikibook site, I am linking many glossary terms to a wikibook page. I think we can take advantage of the already developed contents in order to not being redundant. Wiktionary offers its own definitions but from a different scope, so I think a Math Glossary is still a good and helpfull resource for WE. What do you think? Cheers, Gladys Gahona http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Chela5808 Note: I apologize in advance for any english grammar mistake. I am on my way to improve my english :-). On 5 ene, 18:00, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: Can we mass-populate this from an existing math dictionary? If we are creating it from scratch, what are we doing that distinguishes it from all other math dictionaries created until now? If it's just the format, we can get a robot to re-format stuff for us, I bet. Failing that, kids ::evil grin:: We played a game with kids called definition war devoted to creating definitions. Kids take turns creating definitions
[WikiEducator] Re: Math gurus: Help needed :-)
Can we mass-populate this from an existing math dictionary? If we are creating it from scratch, what are we doing that distinguishes it from all other math dictionaries created until now? If it's just the format, we can get a robot to re-format stuff for us, I bet. Failing that, kids ::evil grin:: We played a game with kids called definition war devoted to creating definitions. Kids take turns creating definitions and then objecting (they love yelling Objection! like Ace Attorney) and then fixing definitions, etc. It takes about half an hour to make a good definition. For my part, I am yet to see a good definition of multiplication in any dictionary. By good I mean both pedagogically sound and mathematically rigorous, and including enough models of multiplication at least to cover all major number types. Repeated addition kinda fails for Pi*e For Angle, I rather like this dictionary's definition: http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/jeather/maths/dictionary.html It has an applet, a chart, and a bright frame around it all. How can we improve on it? We can use this idea of angles in nature and culture - a collection, open for people's additions... That's beyond a plain dictionary though! I can imagine a format with a convergent and a divergent part. The convergent part is a short definition people can refine and improve. The divergent part, potentially infinite, is where everybody adds their pictures, poetry, movies and what not, illustrating the definition. Something like my MultArt, for each topic. A good model for that, which is a lot of fun, is a wiki called TV Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage It has a trope description, and then an open collection of examples. What do you think? MariaD On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Gladys Gahona gladysgah...@gmail.comwrote: Maria, I recently visited your website http://www.naturalmath.com where I found this lovely page: http://www.naturalmath.com/multpics/index.php I guess I've got your idea concerning to link math concepts to nature and culture. Please see http://www.wikieducator.org/MathGloss/A/Angle and post your comments. For more info about the aims of the project, please visit http://www.wikieducator.org/MathGloss By the way, if you have some free time, please join the project. I am certain you have excellent ideas. Warm wishes Gladys Gahona http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Chela5808 On 31 dic 2008, 08:39, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: I'd like to ask about the goals of this endeavor, just to clarify style and content needs. I use Wolfram's MathWorld for my math dictionary. It's imperfect because it's not pedagogically sound: the definitions don't have newbie-friendly versions or enough connections to other areas of human life. I love 3d animations, pictures, and the level of detail, though. My dream online math dictionary has multiple levels of definitions, pedagogical supports for beginners such as metaphors and rich illustrations, and web as a platform tools for taking the dictionary with you, so to speak, as you browse other pages. The goal would be to help math newbies, especially kids, to mathematize their usual web activities, bringing more cool math into whatever they do. As you can see, dictionary contents depend on goals... Cheers, MariaD On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 10:32 PM, Wayne wmackint...@col.org wrote: Hi everyone, This is an invitation to all Math educators in WikiEducator Gladys Gahona (http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Chela5808) has started developing a Math Glossary in WikiEducator. See: http://www.wikieducator.org/MathGloss/A This is an open invitation to all WikiEducators with a passion for Math to assist Gladys in developing this resource. Follow the example from this page: http://www.wikieducator.org/MathGloss/A If you have a free moment --- feel free to add your favourite definition to the glossary :-) Cheers Wayne --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative
Valerie, We can move forward relatively quickly because we have a dedicated software team on the project - my husband and I have a software company, so we can draw on the expertise and experience. Still, I always want to move faster!!! You know how it is... At least we will have a beautiful front page and site design in a couple of days. This took forever because I kept tweaking things around in sketches. You pose an excellent question - a research problem, even. I guess if I were to situate it, it would turn into, How do we build the semantic web (web 3.0) out of our stuff? Or maybe it's too broad? Little RLOs from Natural Math, every one of them, are about users creating something. For the Family Multiplication Study in particular, we are building a structure where there is a creation hub (multiplication planet site, named by an activity, such as snowflakes, patterns in the multiplication table, your own number systems, your own board or computer games and so on) and then individual creations around each hub, kinda like settlers building houses and barns and such to form a village. I think the information of how each settler family moved among hubs is useful too, so we are going to capture those journeys. People, naturally, describe what information and tools they used - manipulatives, sites, books and so on. I posed the condition that when people cite a non-open (or non-Creative Commons) source, they describe the relevant part enough for others to be able to do the activity without buying the source. But a family story can't all be about the information the family found somewhere: it has to be about what they built using the information. Valerie, I would like to know more about your project! Are your students authoring? I guess it's a philosophical question, because assembling information in novel ways (citing, mashing, linking) is considered a form of authoring by many. Yet I am going for a pretty direct definition of authoring here: users creating their own definitions, making up their own math operations, posing their own problems, coming up with their own patterns, building their own systems and so on. If we go by Bloom's Digital Taxonomy http://www.techlearning.com/article/8670 - I am chasing the top two levels (creating and evaluating). Looking forward to learning more about your work, MariaD On Sun, Dec 28, 2008 at 10:15 PM, valerie vtay...@gmail.com wrote: Maria That is wonderful to hear that you are moving forward so quickly. Please let us know when you are ready to let us see your beta version. Is there a format for the information that can facilitate capturing the past human action ? Rather than just going back and gathering information automatically, it might be interesting and useful to also have a format to guide mentors and learners recording the information. I have my students research a topic and provide the information to the class. Is there some place or format where they can record their work that could help your capturing process? ..Valerie On Dec 27, 7:54 am, Maria Droujkova droujk...@gmail.com wrote: We should have about half of the features I described in beta early in January. The magic is in capturing past human action and serving up the aggregated knowledge contained therein, automatically. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative
Barbara, I think I am missing something there... The content I can get is all pdfs, which is kind of limiting for representations (text and pictures). Also, some pages have no content at all, other than an ad for a web site, like this algebra page: http://cnx.org/content/m16260/latest/ What am I doing wrong? Can you please point me to one or two of these good mashed-up things you mentioned? Cheers, MariaD On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 5:19 AM, Barbara Dieu beeonl...@gmail.com wrote: I have recently been to a short presentation of The Connexions project (funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) from Rice University. http://cnx.org I saw some of the mashed-up books and collage material that was produced by the teachers and was quite impressed. The platform looks quite user-friendly as well. Are you familiar with their work in the OER field? Warm regards from Brazil and have a wonderful holiday time :-) Bee -- Barbara Dieu http://barbaradieu.com http://beespace.net --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wikieducator-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] An interesting /. discussion on open source
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/10/001236 The original article (teacher confiscating some Linux discs and writing an angry letter about it) may or may not be a fake, but the discussion of issues in the comments was really curious to me. For example, many people believe that teachers believe that free=(crap OR illegal). I guess people aren't looking at social software at all? Who expects blogs, wikis or hosting sites (Flickr, Youtube) to be NOT free? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities groups.google.com/group/multiplicationstudy the family multiplication study --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: WikiEducator goes non-violent?
If we include coercive in the definition of violent then forcing kids learn is an example of violent content. As a math educator, I see a lot of kiddie torture related to my subject. This is also a good example of how varied our definitions of violent behavior can be. I meet very few people who share that definition. On Mon, Dec 8, 2008 at 6:25 PM, Leigh Blackall [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Can you describe what violent behavior and content might look like in Wikieducator? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative
I'd like to describe a system we have started to develop in the family multiplication study. The reusable objects there are small according to The reusability paradox: http://web.archive.org/web/20041019162710/http://rclt.usu.edu/whitepapers/paradox.htmlEach object (or, to using the discover the multiplication planet metaphor of the study - not a Lego metaphor, hehe - a multiplication planet site) is a very brief, skeletal description of a project or activity. The only requirement of an activity design is that it should invite each participant to create, build, invent and in general author their own mathematics. A few examples of the current multiplication planet sites: spirolaterals (sequences, order, rotation can be investigated and designed), snowflakes (folding, reflection, rotation, contents of each segment), mirror books (an art project about symmetry and 2d transformations), design your own multiplication war game (coming up with buff cards and other game rules). This is the study's mailing list: http://www.groups.google.com/group/multiplicationstudy Participating families select an activity per week, then describe how it went for them. Some families design their own, throw in design ideas, or request a design: something about World War II or whatever we can do without writing or something to help us memorize. Parents describe themselves and their kids - as an aside, you'd be surprised how little age correlates with requested level of activities. Technically, after the study runs for a while, you can collect activity descriptions, edit comments that go with them, and publish a sort of multiplication text. However, even if we exclude the idea that the community designs new activities every week, one goal of the study is to help future participants plan their own travel routes on the multiplication planet, based on how previous people selected activity sequences. I can't see a book providing such a service, because it involves software analyzing a database. I envision somebody following a friends' path, for example, or finding a family with similar philosophy and structure and following their steps, or going from the Snowflake activity to the Mirror book activity because both deal with symmetry and there are strong topic connections that a lot of people followed before. I'd like to see something like Amazon's book suggestions: people like you read these books - except on activity-to-activity basis. It's too early in the study to tell, but intuitively, it feels like the social aspects of the system won't be easy, or possible, to capture in a book format. A book may be a nice souvenir of the past of the study, but it won't provide the services participation in that community provides. This last paragraph is dreaming, brainstorming and wild speculation - please take it as such. A claim: history and story (narrative) help us understand and reify past activities for the purposes of planning the future and dealing with the present. A constructivist claim: In the beginning was the deed - to learn, do. A novice, in addition or instead of catching up on the (dead, reified) past through narratives, can be active in creating her own actions and adventures in active and adventurous current communities of practice. This requires tools that support action directly - both authoring action and social community action. A wiki can be such a tool, a book - ? -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities groups.google.com/group/multiplicationstudy the family multiplication study On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 10:48 PM, Wayne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Leigh In practical terms -- can you describe the teaching-learning system you envisage in terms of the functions of teaching and elements of the system. I'm not sure that I understand what you are talking about. Cheers Wayne On Sat, 2008-12-06 at 14:21 +1100, Leigh Blackall wrote: I'm not convinced we are pioneers at all. Illich is significant to me not for hi Deschooling Society, but for his vision of learning webs. As he describes it (in chapter 6 I think), Bolivia was rolling out OER in the form of television. The cost of television back then meant that Bolivia could afford 1 tv per 5000 Bolivians. Illich proposed a networked communication through audio cassette recordings. At the time, he proposed that Bolivia could afford 1 cassette recorder per 5 Bolivians with enough money left over to set up a postal service to facilitate the exchange of audio recordings being sent in by farmers and kids. He was talking about audio blogging, where today the cost of achieving what Illich envisioned is greatly reduced for us in the wealthy economies, but still impossible for your average Bolivian I guess. Even with OLPCs the difficulty of using a cassette recorder and postal service compared to an OLPC is
[WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative
I think we could package parts of it as small learning objects for people to develop further. I see several so far: 1 - roles of textbooks and comparison to other entities 2 - content and instructional design as two dimensions of learning 3 - emergent pedagogies structurally different from each other (a taxonomy of pedagogies?) 4 - specifically, learning webs and communities of practice vs. pedagogies of hierarchical organizations (industrial models) For myself, I see the following uses for the four objects: 1, 2 - flamebait and brainstorm facilitation tools (use to start word-based communities, events and entities, possibly to form reading lists of articles together) 3 - can develop into a tool for choosing pedagogies for my projects 4 - directly applies to my current community of practice projects as a framework On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Randy Fisher [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Guys, This is such a fascinating discussion... Is there any way to package this - and use it as the basis of some learning materials for a course on something :-) It's just such great dialogue I'm wondering how we can give it more life than simply in the google group.. - Randy -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities groups.google.com/group/multiplicationstudy the family multiplication study --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative
I emailed the letter Wayne included here off-list, because I was not sure it would be of general interest, or if he had time to respond at all. An answer of that detail is definitely of general interest, that's probably why Wayne replied to the whole list. Thanks for the references, Wayne! Much appreciated. On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Leigh Blackall [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Is anyone else having the experience in this thread where responses are being made to posts not made in the thread? For example, Wayne is responding to Maria here, but as far as I can tell, Maria has only made one post to this thread, and the quote Wayne includes in his reply is not in that post... On Sat, Dec 6, 2008 at 8:13 AM, Wayne [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Maria, On Fri, 2008-12-05 at 07:29 -0500, Maria Droujkova wrote: Wayne, What are more names to look up on the subject, especially metalearning and teaching/learning in communities of practice including community objects in relationships? This is extremely useful, and I need to educate myself better. From all I know, separating instructional design from curriculum development is a dangerous idea originating in the assembly line mentality. Intuitively, content and activity developers (in the plural) should work together in a coherent community of practice which includes learners as active participants. It's never easy to suggest a list of readings that adequately cover an area of research interest like open distance learning. What to include? -- inevitably the readings you leave off the list are more important than those included ;-). Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive or authoritative list -- I think, that there are two aspects for WikiEducator to consider as we work towards building a sustainable model for OER instructional texts using a peer collaboration model. *1. There is a lot we can learn from the distance education experience regarding the design and incorporation of integrated learning activities* This thread is about instructional texts and the relationship between content and form as expressed in the process of learning design. Much of the research on instructional text was pre-Web (gee hard to believe that most of us actually lived in that time --- the Web is only 5000 days old! see: Kevin Kelly http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J132shgIiuYfeature=related). In the pre web days the dominant mass communication technology used by distance educators / learners was the printed text. The challenge for distance educators was how do you teach effectively when the learner is separated from the teaching in time, place and pace. I've already mentioned the work of Derek Rowntree and Fred Lockwood but would also consider taking a look at Borje Holmberg's postulates around guided didactic conversation and the relationships between simulated and real lecturer-student interactions. Michael Moore's work on transactional distance provides an insightful analysis of the relationships between structure and dialogue regarding teaching-learning interactions in asynchronous learning environments. Peter Johansson has done a lot of work on instructional texts from a Psychology perspective. With regards to the Metalearning research of the 1980s and 1990s the work of John B Biggs is a good starting point. Biggs' work provides a research base confirming that the design of appropriate learning activities and assessment strategies can promote deep learning. What's interesting with this research is the evidence that low ability learners using deep learning strategies can achieve learning outputs which compare favourably with high ability learners -- hence making a strong case for the incorporation of well-designed and engaging learning activities in asynchronous materials. You make a very good point regarding the risks of separating learning design from content development -- referencing communities of practice. In the distance education world -- the large single-mode distance education providers pioneered and implemented what we call the Course Team approach. These DE institutions constituted professional development teams comprising subject matter experts, learning designers, multimedia professionals, graphic designers and editors who worked collaboratively in developing the learning materials. The wiki environment provides us with the opportunity to constitute distributed course development teams --- and I'm hope that the WikiEducator community can develop and refine processes to replicate this model for OER using social software. We piloted the approach with the development of the OER Handbook. The primary author was based in the US, we commissioned a critical content reviewer who was based in South Africa, our graphic designer we located in New Zealand and I tried to assist with some learning design here in Vancouver. We learned about processes for managing a distributed course team
[WikiEducator] Re: Building a sustainable WE OER Textbook initiative
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Leigh Blackall [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Wayne says: If the knowledge society is structurally different from industrialised society -- the open question we could ask is whether we will see a new pedagogy emerging which is structurally different from both agrarian and industrial approaches? Obviously we are seeing that. Benkler's Wealth of Networks, Siemens Connectivism, Downes' Connected Knowledge but more importantly in my view, Illich's Learning Webs idea for Bolivia, cited in his book Deschooling Society - predating ODL, ignoring instructional design, and predicting post industrial society enabled by networked communications. Illich was interested in networked communications empowering subsistance living. I'd like to include communities and webs of homeschoolers into this list. Homeschoolers are probably one of the highest-networked populations; they (or I should say we) are socially active in general, and exploring new pedagogical approaches in particular. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities groups.google.com/group/multiplicationstudy the family multiplication study --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: K12 initiative making the news
Education is a set of tools we grab as needed, for our current work and play. Starting from that (radical unschooling) position... What are things I can be doing with our local math clubs that go beyond personal and intra-club meanings, and toward community meanings? Kids creating purely educational materials so other kids can participate in purely educational projects devoted to creating purely educational materials for purely... This is a bit too self-referential for my taste. I'd like to see kids creating tools so other kids can work and play. What can those be, as far as math is concerned? Asking for ideas. -- Cheers, MariaD Make math your own, to make your own math. --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: !!RE: [WikiEducator] Re: Another Milestone
Well, I should have probably said a network of goals implying openness, lack of bounds, non-hierarchical structure, and impossibility to know exactly how many there are. Here is why I am asking this question, though. If Wikispaces' network of goals mostly contains Wikieducator's network of goals, why have two structures? If that overshadowing, centralized set of goals and expectations you just mentioned (not a network? a hierachy? hmmm) is a separate, different set from Wikispaces' goals, what are the main differences? As a new person, I can't see this level of summary for myself, so I am asking. On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 7:35 AM, Leigh Blackall [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: But Maria! There we go again! Is there one single goal (or list of goals) for Wikieducator? Clearly there is, and that's what I'm challenging in some respects. I have my goals, you have yours.. what we share is an interest in education and the ability to share resources. Wikispaces focuses on providing a usable and reliable platform, so I giess that's its goal (as well as to sustain an income for its administrators). It just so happens that a great many teachers use Wikispaces for educational purposes and they license CC BY SA. They do so right along side projects that have nothing to do with education. SO you see there are infinite goals in Wikispaces as there are in reality on Wikieducator. Its just that in Wikieducator, we are over shadowed by a centralised set of goals and expectations. On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Maria Droujkova [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Leigh, and others, What are the main differences in goals (and, as a result, software-as-law) of Wikispaces and Wikieducator? On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 7:22 AM, Leigh Blackall [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Nellie, I'm reflecting on the reality that not a lot of collaboration happens the way we seem to expect it to happen, and yet there is productivity. From my experience, the availability of an add free media wiki in which to develop web content for my inidividual purposes is a primary motivation to use Wikieducator (along with the many other free publishing services that are available). If my work is of use to others that is great, but more and more I am becoming comfortable with the fact that collaboration in terms of page edits is actually insignificant and unimportant to me here. Now days I wonder if I actually even want collaboration in the sense we are expecting - the page edit sense. That sort of collaboration is certainly enabled by the wiki, and is evident in things like Wikipedia - but we are not building an encylcopedia are we. What we are doing is much more open ended, much more complex with everypage designed for a specific context, basically impossible for random uncoordinated collaborative edits like there is in Wikipedia. So, I'm wondering if we should adjust our expectations about collaboration? I'm proposing a consideration of a networked and distributed collaboration, much like what can be observed in blogging networks for example, and what we can see on the Wikispaces project. Could it be that a networked and distributed collaboration is more realistic and in fact waht is happening here? If we came to the project with this type of understanding about collaboration, would that change the rewards, motivations and expectations? Where does that leave the idea of one-ness that is promoted in Wikieducator? I would hope that it would lead to Wikieducator being very much in the background. -- Cheers, MariaD I write, 'In the beginning was the Deed!' - Goethe, Faust naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities -- -- Leigh Blackall +64(0)21736539 skype - leigh_blackall SL - Leroy Goalpost http://learnonline.wordpress.com http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Leighblackall -- Cheers, MariaD I write, 'In the beginning was the Deed!' - Goethe, Faust naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: !!RE: [WikiEducator] Re: Another Milestone
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 9:58 AM, Peter [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Minhaaj, I'd be very interested in your detailed definition of profiteering. I think I may be getting a sense of what you mean, but I think I may be missing even what should be considered profit... or why taken in a different context (yours) why what is going on should be considered profiteering... Sincerely, Peter I'd be specifically interested in the distinction this definition makes between profit and benefit. I've been looking at non-monetary economies for some time. They don't have these clear boundaries between profits and benefits that money-based economies have. Supposedly, all project participants benefit, though. -- Cheers, MariaD I write, 'In the beginning was the Deed!' - Goethe, Faust naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: !!RE: [WikiEducator] Re: Another Milestone
I haven't yet come across any materials that really get into teaching people to collaboratively create materials... Maybe this is an OER that is well overdue... upon a review of the recently published OER handbook (http:// www.wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator) there isn't a lot of materials on encouraging collaboration... In Here comes everybody, a wonderful book overall, Shirky talks about levels of interaction, listing sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. Unfortunately, all his examples of collective action are protests :-) I think social software can elevate simple sharing into something bigger, better and more meaningful. One easy collaboration task is creating a collection. I've used the task many times in different settings, from international conferences to algebra playgroups for five year olds. Here is the latest online collection example: collecting math morphemes into an English language extender called MathLexicon http://www.naturalmath.com/mathlexicon/index.php. It's basically a dictionary ran with a couple of game mechanics. Maybe we can have a lesson creation party where we can collect some lesson ideas, collectively ;-) Everybody can contribute from the point of view of his or her discipline. We can build a whole lesson this way, which will, surely, be bigger than the sum of our individually contributed parts. -- Cheers, MariaD I write, 'In the beginning was the Deed!' - Goethe, Faust naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Free materials for primary education in physics available
Gunther, I am interested in using the materials with local homeschool coops. Is there a web site for them? On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 3:51 AM, Günther Osswald [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear WikiEducators, Celebration! SUPRA is free! The University of Munich/Germany (LMU) has released about 1000 pages of high quality materials for elementary education in physics (and local history) under the CC-BY license. See my post of July 2, 2008: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator/browse_thread/thread/f754882a66ae2444/b44855cc9df61bb8?lnk=gstq=supra#b44855cc9df61bb8 Let me add at this place a big thanks to all who have contributed to these pages, often generously immolating free weekends! I'd like to ask all who are interested in using SUPRA to give me a short note, so that we can find out how we could organize the translation into English. Regards from cold and rainy Bavaria, Günther -- Cheers, MariaD I write, 'In the beginning was the Deed!' - Goethe, Faust naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: Storytelling cluster / project node
I am interested in using storytelling for mathematics. There are some classic stories such as Hotel Infinity - but the goal would be for each person to create his or her own story about a topic. Here is a (very loose) summary of my plans, so far: - Either another human, or some software has to get people going, as far as math is concerned. The software can take the form of interactive prompts for each topic, based on prior mathematics education research of that topic's metaphors. For example, prompts for proportionality may have to do with uneven sharing (like pirates and the captain), or with body proportions (Vitruvian man vs. anime characters). The software will use a domain specific language to generate, basically, a mini-game that will serve as a story prompt, scaffolding the math parts but soliciting open picture and situation input from each user. - There should be all the usual social web support for sharing, commenting, expanding, embedding, ranking, tagging and so on of the resulting game and story objects. - There should be some way to expand metaphor collections for each topic, which will involve some basic programming - this can be implemented either by inviting everybody to program, or by inviting people to send suggestions to a team of programmers This is in the early research stages. I found people and software doing vaguely similar things, but I have not started to write detailed component descriptions. -- Cheers, MariaD I write, 'In the beginning was the Deed!' - Goethe, Faust naturalmath.com: a sketch of a social math site groups.google.com/group/naturalmath: a mailing list about math maker activities --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
[WikiEducator] Re: WIkiEducator 3.0 -- Asking the right questions
Hello, I am new here! /wave Jumping into the middle of it right away... On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 11:13 AM, valerie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't know if this is something new that is needed or something that already exists. What I would really like to do is browse or graze through WikiEducator - like flipping through a magazine or a journal. I'm sure there is lots of great stuff, but I have yet to find a good way to see the broad spectrum and stumble upon stuff. I think the fundamental structure of wikis is non-hierarchical, and as such, it does not lend itself well to taxonomic (hierarchical) activities such as browsing through the table of contents or mapping. However, there are other tools that may kind of feel like it. Flickr is one of my favorite examples of excellent use of such tools. They are all social. I am extremely new to WE, so I don't know, yet, which capabilities exist, so what I list may or may not be available - they are general examples of what Valerie describes, implemented socially in non-hierarchical, open spaces. It's all about people. Tags and tag collections (clouds) let you browse by folksonomic labels. You see what other people thought of as labels and which of those became popular, so far. Popular=starting point for grazing. Favorites (subscriptions, lists) of people allow you to follow a particular participant's tastes. If you know One Good Person (TM), you can follow their favorites and quickly get oriented. Discovering such soul mates in a new community is a rewarding and useful experience in itself, because later you can collaborate with them. Statistics, such as most visited pages, most changes in the last week, most comments and so on, allow you to follow hot spots of human activity. Searches - I know you said you don't know good searches yet, but still, if you search for ten or so of your favorite topics, you will probably find some starting points. Some social sites have additional featured content where site owners or some other ruling body highlights what they deem important. It's dangerous for obvious reasons. I am curious as to which of these things are implemented in this wiki community. Cheers, MariaD naturalmath.com --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups WikiEducator group. To visit wikieducator: http://www.wikieducator.org To visit the discussion forum: http://groups.google.com/group/wikieducator To post to this group, send email to wikieducator@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
