Hi Everyone, There is an exciting discussion thread taking place in L4C-1, and we'd like to cross post it on WikiEducator Main groups, and continue the discussion there.
- Randy ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Wayne Mackintosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 11:28 AM Subject: Reflections from a L4C participant To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi Kim & friends PLEASE READ THIS EMAIL -- IT CONTAINS IMPORTANT REFECTIONS ON BUILDING OUR WIKIEDUCATOR FAMILY. Thanks for the detailed reflections, thoughts and suggestions. This demonstrates the power of community approaches -- together we are able to improve through reiterative cycles of improvement. I hope you don't mind -- but I've created a new thread from your post. This is important stuff and others from the group may want to add their thoughts in helping us get better. This will help us in building a thriving international community of WikiEducators in realisation of our aim of a libre curriculum by 2015! I provide my specific responses in text below. On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 10:18 +0200, Kim Tucker wrote: Hi Wayne (and all), Thanks Wayne et al for running the Learning4Content Pilot,and thanks to participants for the comments and conversations. Thanks Kim -- much appreciated. I looked at the last few tasks last night and added a link to my contribution (additions to [[Libre knowledge]]). This is an important resource and adds considerable value to our understanding of free/libre knowledge. As always, your enthusiasm is contagious and that is one of the keyingredients. The inspiration comes for the community -- WikiEducator is by far the most rewarding and meaningful project of my career. It's great waking up in the morning thinking -- What can I contribute to WikiEducator today? Judging by the web-site trafic and edits in our project -- I know that there are many others who think the same <smile>. I found the number of e-mails a little overwhelming and did not readmany of them.So probably lost out on some great insights! Kim that's a good point -- there has been quite a bit of traffic and I know that it can be overwhelming, particularly when you're trying to clear your inbox from your regular work mail. Its been a tough call -- large groups generate email traffic. That said WE does not want to turn anyway away from free training. mmmm thinking here -- Google groups has an option to edit membership settings where folk can decide how they would like to particpant. Eg. via the web alone or single email per day etc. I'll work on a set of instructions showing folk how to do this -- which may help in managing the traffic on the list. I'm afraid the missing great insights will always be a risk -- that's life <smile>. Perhaps a summary of great insights about wiki learning from each coursecould be written up?If I had time I would volunteer to do this ... alternatively we could have a [[Gems of insight on wiki learning]] pageto list those one-liners (e.g. "Every edit counts" :-). The page could be progressively structured. Yeah -- In would really like to see a summary of great insights and or a collation of sorts emerge from this list. Are there any other folk on the list who would be interested in helping to write up a summary based on the list. This could be done in WikiEd as an ongoing project taking into account that there will be a few more workshops. Any volunteers? Several questions arise from a research perspective and with respect toreporting back to investors.You have probably thought about all of these before, but anyway: Hey -- these are an amazing set of questions. I've set up a new page linked our resources list which will hopefully grow with the L4C project. I'll post copies of my responses to this page and hope that the community will add their reflections and new questions to the list. See: http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content/Resources/Measuring_success * How do we measure success? The WikiEducator project is successful when we have achieved a self-sustaining ecosystem. Performance indicators include: - Financial contributions from institutions to support the technical infrastructure of the WikiEducator project - In kind contributions where institutions allocate staff time or full time equivalents (FTEs) to the development of educational resources. Thus time spent on WikiEducator is recognised is an official responsibility in the respective work plans and job descriptions of selected staff. - Educational institutions incorporate training in using WikiEducator as part of their official professional development programmes - The number of learning hours in official courses using teaching materials developed on WikiEducator. - Measuring the conversion rate of active contributors in WikiEducator. That is, increasing the ratio of active contributors expressed in terms of the number of user accounts in WikiEducator - When the L4C project started our conversion rate of active contributors was about 10% of registered account holders in WikiEducator. - Appropriately 30% of registered participants for the L4C pilot workshop submitted Learning Contracts. Hopefully the conversion rate of active contributors will increase as a result of the requirement to produce a teaching resource for the project. How do we measure successful completion and progress of L4C participants? - The ratio of participants who attain the certification of WikiBuddy - The ratio of learning contracts successfully completed ** What is realistic to expect of the people who register for such a course?*** For many, the pressure of deadlines, and the immediate pressures atwork, make even the 20 minutes required per day inaccessible.**** What percentage of registrants should get how far? Or do we onlyneed to count the number of people who complete the exercises? Good questions -- see my initial thoughts above. ***** Sometimes the contribution of people who know no more than how to edit text pages is highly significant. I agree entirely -- we need to think about what this contributions are, how we will know about them and how to measure them. I'd welcome thoughts and ideas -- please post these on the relevant wiki page: http://wikieducator.org/Learning4Content/Resources/Measuring_success Here I'm thinking about folk who become WikiAmbassadors and record their ambassadorial work - see: http://wikieducator.org/Ambassadors Also, managers and leaders who take the initiative to host a L4C workshop by providing access to their computer lab is another good example. ** How do we measure the contributions of individuals? Is there a way togenerate abstracted data from all the "my contributions" of the peoplewho have contributed to a set of pages?*** e.g. on WikiVersity we are planning a competition for contributorsto the Social Entrepreneurship initiative, and '''possibly''' a similarcompetition on WikiEducator for our "Innovate" conference later this year.* How do we build teacher/learner communities around specific clustersof learning resources? I think we need to focus energies here on the respective country pages. This is the place where countries organise themselves into one or more national *WikiEducator Teams:* http://wikieducator.org/Countries ** Perhaps an exercise at the end of the course would be to have theusers tag their user pages from a selection of tags (with the option ofcreating new ones): e.g. [[Category:Physics Teacher]], [[Category:Biologylearner]], etc. We've got a few ideas here -- I'll be implementing a new Personal Infobox -- which apart from the certification of Wiki skills will also encourage folk to add tags to their page. Kim, I really like the idea of [[Category:Physics Teacher]]. We need to develop a set of User boxes for this see the link to user boxes from here: http://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:Infoboxes * What is a reasonable ratio of facilitators : learners in such a course?** Having such short exercises and a low pressure programme (20-30 mins/day) isconsistent with how we might expect WikiEducator to develop (mostly): many peoplemaking small contributions. That's a good question. Typically in online forums like this, ideally you would not want to exceed a ratio of 30:1. But hey -- as a volunteer project, I'm more than happy to facilitate groups numbering in the hundreds <smile>. On more serious note we are looking for facilitators to help. We have posted a bounty looking for faciliators -- see: http://wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:Bounties So if anyone in the group would like to become a facilitator, or you know someone who would like to help -- please encourage them to submit an expression of interest. All in all the experience was useful, even though I already knew how todo most of the editing tasks. I may register for future courses to beable to tap into some of the insights shared if I may.We might need some extra venues to directpeople if they detract from the focus of learning how to useWikiEducator - i.e. some extra talk/discussion pages on things like "quality", ordebates around the success of wikis in education, etc. Good suggestions Kim -- at the very least we should encourage participants to join the main WIkiEducator list. I'll be posting a separate message about this soon. Cheers for now and thanks again Kim -- ________________ Randy Fisher aka "Wikirandy for WikiEducator" http://www.wikieducator.org/User:Wikirandy + 1 604.684.2275 [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.hirerandy.com Skype: wikirandy --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. 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