I think the more we work together to edit things the better...It not only helps clarify ideas, it gives us all practice on the best ways to do it collaboratively and cordially. Joyce McKnight, SUNY Empire State College
kirby urner <[email protected]>
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12/12/2009 09:25 AM PSTPlease respond [email protected]
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Subject Re: [WikiEducator] Re: WE blog or newsletter?
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Wayne Mackintosh <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Chris, Valery and Kirby
The planetplanet software is great and well aligned with our open community values :-)
I don't see any issues with installing this as a WikiEducator subdomain. This will be great way for aggregating blog-feeds about WikiEducator from our community members.
The only issue is going to be one of timing - -we're currently migrating WikiEducator over to the Athabasca servers --- however, our test installation is not yet performing at the levels we would like :-(. We're in the process of putting more metal into the cluster so that our site will perform at the levels we expect from WikiEducator.
If possible, We'd prefer to avoid double work with two installations of the planet software. We would appreciate a couple of weeks breathing space to get this operational -- Is that OK?
An open question -- with regards to the WikiEducator blog itself, we've been throwing around a few ideas. What do you think about the WikiEducator blog being more wiki-like -- in other words where the WE blogging team collaborate openly on the post in the wiki way -- a blog post which everyone can edit. We'll need to take a look at available extensions and think about RSS feeds, comments etc. Personally, I think this would be rather COOL. Thoughts?
Cheers
Wayne
Hi Wayne --
The Planet approach looks promising, as does a community blog.
We come to Wikieducator from different walks of life, so I'll tell some of my story as a use case example, including how I find myself promoting Wikieducator to peers, in hopes of attracting more content, such as lesson plans.
As someone involved with the Buckminster Fuller corpus, one of its long haul champions (since 1980s), I found Wikieducator gave me a fresh context, complete with well thought out tools, to package curriculum materials I've been collecting and refining for many years, sometimes in collaboration, sometimes alone.
Now that I have a small suite of pages, I'm looking for more internal links to pages others are working on. I'm also out recruiting a breed of math teacher not afraid to innovate, to tackle new challeges.
One of those challenges is how to bring more experiences with computer languages into everyday math learning.
I just posted another update to Math Forum hosted by Drexel University, circling the new Sample MM Lesson Plan I just added yesterday.
MM = Martian Math, one of four broad brush stroke topical areas designed to work either in unison, or as standalone modules.
Martian Math is where we allow ourselves to get futuristic. The geometry seems alien. And yet it's correct, precise, accessible and with a strong track record of applications, especially in architecture, chemistry and biology.
I'm always shocked that more teachers aren't already covering this same material. I have little competition and it's a big world so wouldn't fear it, plus my efforts seem obscure to the extent no one else joins me in doing this work (at the college level, you'll find more overlap, but even here it's a bleak landscape these days).
My motivation in using Wikieducator to publish free content, is to encourage more teachers to pick up the ball and run with it, maybe tell me about it later.
As you can see, I believe in my product and so my recruiting drive sometimes has that salemanish fanatical tinge, but that's expected in a true believer, any died-in-the-wool "world game player" of any stripe. One needs driven individuals such as myself simply to get over the various learning curves associated with learning to use Wikieducator effectively.
I'm still just a newcomer Wikibuddy and feel I have a long way to go on that score, yet have made excellent progress thanks to a supportive infrastructure and the benign, philanthropic motives of WE's leadership.
I'll post a link to that post in the Math Forum when it appears (this is a moderated list), so you can better see how I promote Wikieducator to my audience. In the meantime, I have this short essay on Constructivism that might interest a few here (Ed Cherlin for example):
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2019948&tstart=0
My guess is a lot of teachers do something similar: get their materials on-line and then face a peer group, suggesting a "come on in, the water's fine" attitude.
Having a large repository of interlinked courseware is what everyone thinks is necessary (me included).
I appreciate your work and encourage you to keep doing it.
Our "global university" (GU) thanks you -- I use GU interchangebly with Fuller's moniker Spaceship Earth (SE), as a way of looking at the whole planet.
Kirby Urner
Portland, Oregon
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