Hi Everyone, WE is a unique educational wiki project in many respects. We are different, for example, from Wikipedia in the sense that our collaboration is not focused on developing an objective encyclopedia entry resulting from the micro-contributions of a large number of editors. At the same time, we benefit from the advantages associated with mass collaboration, for example shared training materials.
Moreover, WE has organised itself as a community of educators working on a wide range of different OER artifacts, for example: open textbooks, OER courses for online teaching, learning activities based on external resources, lessons, articles and research papers, handouts, glossary projects for use as a reference resource, the establishment of project or community nodes, the development of funding proposals as free content etc. Other wiki projects within the OER landscape have organised themselves around the nature of the objects being produced, for instance: Encyclopedia articles in the case of Wikipedia <http://www.en.wikipedia.org/> or books in the case of Wikibooks <http://www.en.wikibooks.org/> . Therefore we need to think creatively about how our community develops procedures to support the attainment of our individual and collective aims, while respecting the intent of the original creators. For example: - There are institutions which develop courses on WikiEducator which are not intended for collaborative authoring due to local curriculum requirements. - There are individuals who develop materials on WikiEducator which they would like to make available for others to create derivative works, but would prefer not to have other educators edit their materials. - There are many projects in WikiEducator which are seeking wide collaboration and contributions from the community. So the question is: How do we support and respect educator contributions in WE given the different intentions of our individual contributions? Valerie has alerted my attention to this important topic (see: http://wikieducator.org/Thread:Ownership,_status,_granularity_and_category_(3)) -- Thanks Valerie. So what is the best way to signify intent and "ownership" of OER materials in WikiEducator. How do we communicate and respect a contributor's intention where they do not want collaborative authoring and participation on their OER resources? If an educator finds a valuable resource they want to use and improve -- can they edit and change the resource without creating problems for the original authors resulting from their modifications? Clearly we need a mechanism to visually communicate the intent of the creator to prospective editors. We need a messaging system which says, for instance: - I need help and welcome WikiEducators to collaborate, edit and improve this resource, or - I have no problems if you copy this resource and modify for your own purposes -- but will appreciate if you don't make changes because I'm using this in my course, or - I don't mind editorial improvements but don't want editors to make substantive changes to my OER --- suggestions and comments are welcome on the corresponding talk page. It seems to me that we need a template or content infobox which clearly communicates the intent of the original OER creator in terms of "permissible" contributions and/or restrictions with regard to community edits. Thoughts? Are there any other intents than those listed above? You gotta love the WikiEducator project -- we're figuring out solutions that work for education. We're pioneering the future that has already happened :-). Cheers Wayne -- 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 [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
