Hi Wayne. Thanks for stepping in and Happy New Year to you as well. Greetings to all others.
Below are some thoughts triggered by your reflections. Jan -- Jan Visser, Ph.D. President & Sr. Researcher, Learning Development Institute E-mail: [email protected] Check out: http://www.learndev.org and http://www.facebook.com/learndev Blog: http://jvisser-ldi.blogspot.com/ _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Wayne Mackintosh Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 11:15 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [WikiEducator] perception Hi Valerie, Kirby, Jan, Leo, Rob and Randy At last a remedy for my WE withdrawal symptoms resulting from my summer vacation (and lack of connectivity because of moving house combined with local idiosyncrasies with my previous telecom provider :-( -- with emphasis on previous provider -- I've now changed supplier ;-) Its great to be back -- and my best wishes to all WikiEducators for the new year. 2010 is going to be an amazing year for OER! Apology for the rather long-winded response below -- however, given the importance of quality in education, should we think about setting up a Community Workgroup (http://www.wikieducator.org/Workgroup:WikiEducator_Workgroups/Guidelines )? Do we have folk on the list who would be keen to sign up and help us develop quality guidelines and processes that will work for educators? Reflections Quality is a very pertinent and relevant discussion for our WikiEducator community. As a community of educators -- this is important for us and we have the opportunity (and freedom) to get this right in ways that will work for us (educators and researchers). Gee you got to love open education and open philanthropy -- we can work collaboratively in the co-design of Q & A processes that will support our mission. Nurturing the development of appropriate quality processes is a priority for the OER Foundation -- As a community of educators, quality is important for us WE have made some progress. I look forward to working with the community in pioneering appropriate solutions. <<I agree that quality is a key concept. One idea would be to establish a review board of people with recognized competence who are willing to review final products. This would imply that after a period of collaborative authoring one finalizes the product and avoids further tempering with it. Users can still break it up in pieces and use those in newer developments. But they will at least know that they build on validated components. This seems to be in line with what you refer to below under Item 2.>> A few random thoughts and reflections -- in no specific order: 1. From a technical point of view it would be possible to site a specific historical instance of a wiki page (notwithstanding an open authoring environment). The wiki keeps a history of every edit -- a very powerful feature of the technology. Using the history tab -- we can cite a specific historical instance of a page (see for example: http://wikieducator.org/index.php?title=Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_a_wiki <http://wikieducator.org/index.php?title=Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_a_wik i&oldid=451248> &oldid=451248 ). However, a more user friendly solution for citing specific instances would be great. <<As I said before, I don't think WikiEducator should want to be a citable source. It's not its mission. WE is not doing original research that results in the learning materials it creates. Yes, there is a research community, but that community researches the processes involved in the work of WE. Researchers doing so will likely want to publish their papers in media that are set up to validate their research, i.e., in peer reviewed journals.>> 2. In the future, it will be easier to generate a static instance of content produced collaboratively in WikiEducator. The OER Foundation has secured generous funding support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for building a technical bridge between the Mediawiki software and the Connexions platform (see: http://wikieducator.org/CNX-WE ). When completed -- it will be possible to export a static version of a WikiEducator page for hosting on the Connexions platform -- In this way a dynamic draft can be hosted in parallel with a static version. Useful for research papers and course materials where the teacher would prefer to use a static version of the OER. It will also be possible for going the other way -- that is exporting a Connexions module for collaborative authoring in a wiki environment -- great for saving time with course revisions. <<Sounds like an excellent idea. See also my first comment above.>> 3. As we move forward with the planning for the launch of WikiResearcher.org, the OER Foundation is keen to take a look at refining a Mediawiki extension called Flagged Revisions (see - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:FlaggedRevs ). With some refinement it would be possible to assign peer review rights to "approved" editors. The idea is that edits can be peer reviewed and then 'Flagged" as a peer reviewed resource. Users visiting a page would then see the peer reviewed version as the default view. <<Are you talking here about review of the learning resources WE is supposed to produce or peer review of research done on the WE processes? If the latter, it will take considerable time before one gets recognized as a serious peer reviewed online research journal. There are good examples of such online journals in the biomedical sciences, though, and one may learn from their experience. It may be less costly and less of a distraction if researchers chose to publish at least initially via the existing scientific journals. This also has the advantage that one brings one's work to the attention of colleagues of existing scientific communities that read those journals, thus avoiding preaching to the WE choir, which I think is important.>> 4. WE have made a reasonable start on thinking about quality assurance and review (see: http://www.wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:Quality_Assurance_and_Review ) and the start of a portal page on Q&A (http://www.wikieducator.org/WikiEducator:Quality_Assurance_Framework ) -- this is a great start and we can build on these foundations. <<None of the above may address Valerie's concern regarding the perceptions of her colleagues about anything Wiki. Here, I think, it's important to listen carefully to the arguments of those colleagues. Some of their concerns may be worth our attention. Those that are not worth our attention should still be listened to carefully if any counter argument is going to be worth their attention.>> Thoughts? Cheers Wayne 2010/1/19 valerie <[email protected]> As an assignment in a community college course, my students are asked to find a learning resource in WikiEducator. Finding good learning objects in WE can be difficult, so I have included this assignment to have students find what they thought was complete and interesting. Although there is usually some frustration, they find some amazing WE pages. I'm accumulating a list of pages they discover. However, sometimes I get more information and feedback than I bargained for... I though this was an interesting comment from one of my students. "Also, the color scheme and design of the website is exactly the same as Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is known for false information, and cannot be used for research papers. I feel that this site is similar to Wikipedia; therefore, this site's information cannot be trusted." Sigh... Yes, some of our faculty are convinced that Wikipedia and by association, all wikis, especially those that look like Wikipedia because they use Mediawiki are evil and populated by gangs of internet hooligans intent on provide false information to unsuspecting web users. They explicitly forbid the use of Wikipedia. Has anyone else heard of similar credibility issues for WikiEducator content? Is this something that is limiting adoption of WE learning objects? ..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 [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] -- 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 User Page: http://wikieducator.org/User:Mackiwg 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]
