I apologize ahead of time for derailing this conversation a bit. However, I believe that it presents a good opportunity to touch upon what I believe to be an important issue.
It seems like there is a deeper issue being discussed in this thread than simply the "findability" of a project's site. For example, even if a person is able to come to your project homepage and know how to get there, it doesn't mean that this will necessarily get them any closer to finding what aspects of the project will be the most relevant for them. So, what I think we are talking about is not simply "findability" of a site, but, rather being able to continually reach out to people and engage them and connect them with a project. I believe that for a project to be able to achieve this that participants must continually take on the roll of curator. To provide some intuition behind what I mean, let's consider the job of the curators of a very large art museum. Their goal is not simply to make available their entire collection to the public. If they did this, in some cases it would take a person weeks of walking through miles of corridors and buildings. Instead, their goal is to use their collections as effectively as possible and to facilitate various activities such as exhibits, research, and education. Or, consider the job of curating a large library. Popular and new books are exhibited in a way to both be accessible and inviting. Special collections and exhibits are often carefully crafted collages of information. Creating processes and roles to manage circulations is often of vital importance to whether or not a library is effectively achieving its mission. And then beyond these kinds of activities, curators of libraries must often put their most effort into satifying their steakholders: the local public and community. I believe that the free and open educational resource community is beginning to form large collections and libraries and (perhaps most importantly) it will continue to have more and more success at cultivating new and nurturing existing communities of people that are actually are actually building libraries of knowledge. If we were to organize the work context in which the work is being done, we might say that the members have taken on the roles of author, editor, teacher, student, librarian, and archivist. However, in many of these projects, it is hard to try to claim that a substantial number of participants have taken on the roll of curator. In the long term, I believe that curation is needed in order to constantly rejuvinate projects; revitalize communities; and promote fresh and relevant exhibits and special collections. In the short term, I believe that a focus on curation will make it easier for people to find the best and most relevant free/open educational resources a given project has to offer. It is likely that the biggest challenges in curation will not stem from choosing what works you will exhibit, but instead, the biggest challenges will be in deciding what works will remain in the basement or will not be part of the collection at all. Or, looked at another way, it won't be whether or not there are enough rooms in the building for community members to have meetings and run programs, but what programs will be promoted on on the bulletin board, the latest brochure, or free bookmarks at the counter. To provide a recent and relevant example, one might look toward the recent uproad in the English version of the Wikiversity (a project of the Wikimedia Foundation). Instead of providing for you an ethnographer's analysis of the controversy, I will instead share a single quote from an important discussion thread<http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Community_Review/Wikimedia_Ethics:Ethical_Breaching_Experiments>on the controversy, which reads: The only detailed discussion I have seen about what [Wikiversity (WV)] should be or become has been here, on this wiki (and recently on this page). There is no particular [Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)] view of WV - though recently I have heard a number of Wikipedians suggest that trolls are more welcome here than elsewhere. (It's not clear to me that this is true, but some of the discussions about the deleted project are flavored by those thoughts.) I think the current concerns would be resolved by developing ways to 1. review research projects that would cause trouble for other groups or projects online, or that might hurt individuals through the course of research 2. review any WV projects that might be veiled attempts to continue an ongoing campaign of wiki politics (forum-shopping a grudge, targetting a user one has disagreed with on another project by using them as a case study for 'research', exploring failure modes of other projects) 3. focus WV's scope and mission –SJ <http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Sj>+<http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User_talk:Sj>14:17, 18 March 2010 (UTC) To add a bit of context to this statement, consider that the commentor is a prominent wikipedian, wikimedian, an active member of the OER community, and that he holds a community-elected seat on the board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation. Now, let's, consider his statement that in the ~four years Wikiversity has been existence he had not come across a detailed discussion as to what "Wikiversity should be or [should] become." I do not believe the author is stating that it was simply he who did not come across such discussions, but instead, I believe it is safe to say that those conversations were just non-existent. Further, I do not believe that he feels the project lacks vision or that it is lacking in substance or even participants. Rather, I believe his statement is that the community has not exhibited the kinds of acts of stewardship that one expects to see when there is a group of active curators working together on a project. I believe that his advice is a testament that what people (and especially the board of directors) want to see most with the (en) Wikiversity project is a serious committment to curation of the WikiVersity project and the rise of committed and trusted project curators who can help in stewardship, conflict resolution, and to continually improve the processes and communications. And, lastly, I believe that that the long-term stability of any free and open educational resource project (of any real size) will largely depend upon there being a group of active and committed curators working together. -Josh On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 10:43 PM, john stampe <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, all > > I just read the article "Online. Indexed. Catalogued. Free. But will users > find it?" (available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20100213). The following > quote from the article pretty well sums up the issue: "...making content > free will not guarantee its discovery or usage..." > > The article is about journal articles, but I as I read it I realized that > the basic issue also applies to open education - specifically, WE and the > CollabOERate concept. It is not an issue with marketing (at least not in the > narrow sense of the word), but about being able to get users to find the > material from the internet, especially with the bias that exists toward > proprietary and other copyright restricted material. > > Any thoughts? > > Cheers, > John > > > http://www.wikieducator.org/User:JohnWS > http://johnsearth.blogspot.com > > > -- > 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] > -- "Every time the word 'achievement' or 'academics' is used to mean test scores we cheapen the meaning of both terms." --Deborah Meier -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WikiEducator" group. 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