I will join the herds of cats (lol) supporting Alison's remarks and I also agree with Wayne's perspective on this.
Cheers, Patricia From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wayne Mackintosh Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 6:01 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [WikiEducator] Re: WikiSym: research on wikis Hi Alison, That's a great suggestion. I think there are a number of opportunities to tweak the L4C initiative to provide guided support in getting involved with projects and workgroups. Also -- I'm very keen to explore opportunities for developing intermediate-level tutorials. That is, establishing a "career-path" for WikiEducators after completing the basic L4C training :-). The OER Foundation has limited funding to support the development of intermediate-level tutorials. One option would be developing training resources and corresponding online workshops to help WikiEducators make the transition to workgroups and collaborative projects. Assuming we allocate two or three tutorials @ the intermediate-level to supporting group work -- * What learning outcomes sould we include? * Do we have ideas for a tentative content outline for these tutorials? * What workgroups do we have or new workgroups should we create for this purpose? * Are their WikiEducator volunteers who would be interested in taking this further? mmm -- getting excited about the opportunities. Cheers Wayne 2009/11/4 Alison Snieckus <[email protected]> Thanks, Jim, wonderful resource: One that caught my eye was "Herding the Cats: The Influence of Groups in Coordinating Peer Production?" I've been skeptical of the emphasis on workgroups, but this paper makes a case for how joining a group can affect behavior (and complement individual contributions). http://www.wikisym.org/ws2009/procfiles/p107-kittur.pdf OK, I'm feeling like a cat <smile>. Amazing how they identified a random sample of editors and then extracted key information from their body of work --- and their source was the wiki history data of approx 144 million edits (spanning inception to Oct 2007), wow. The results do make a reasonably good case, given their study design, that editors who are part of a collaborative subgroup change their behavior in ways that benefit the subgroup's work and the wiki as a whole (e.g., good citizenship behaviors). Makes a strong case for WikiEducator workgroups. I agree with Wayne: One of the challenges facing Wikimedia projects is supporting newbies who may not be familiar with the sophistication and complexity of all the polices and guidelines which support group work. What if at the conclusion of an L4C session, new members were encouraged to join one of a set of active project workgroups (not community workgroups, because these often entail a larger commitment to get up to speed). These "next-step" projects could be chosen because the project is currently active, the project work is relatively straightforward, the workgroup has agreed to provide support for the new members as they figure out how to effectively collaborate on the project's work, .... The set of projects could include a broad spectrum of subject-matter, so that individual members could find something that suited their interest. For example, I think the WE math glossary could be a good place for new members who have a background in math. (Full disclosure: it worked for me :-) I'm interested to hear people's thoughts on how workgroups could be used to strengthen the support of new members? Interesting, I think this ties in well with a number of other recent threads on collaboration. Just another side of the same coin. Alison http://www.wikieducator.org/User:ASnieckus -- 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] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
