Keep in mind re "writing down" to students that it's actually the curriculum, not the content, that educators are focussed on. At primary school level it's the outcomes handbooks. At middle school it tends to be those and the balance of established textbooks in the area. At upper high school it's the rather prescriptive curriculum documents. At TAFE it's the training packages in all their joys and constraints. Hence what we have on content, if it can't be linked identifiably with the curriculum, then has to be supplemented with a lot of work by teachers. Teachers generally avoid anything that creates work for them. And as it stands, they have the option of simply printing out pages from Wikipedia (I've seen this done) in areas where they believe it is suitable. In teaching year 9 and 10 biology and chemistry, and even the year 11 chemistry, the answers to the most basic questions would be left completely unanswered by the articles in those areas on WP at present and the language and assumed prior knowledge is so high that even I as a uni-qualified minor in the subject area have trouble comprehending it - let alone a teacher who never qualified in the area and has trouble keeping up with the textbooks. The reason Britannica can be adapted sometimes is that it actually assumes less!
I don't believe that the "Wikipedia philosophy" works so well for schools that it can be taken and used without modification or alteration or accommodation - but WMA is about more than Wikipedia. Some of our strongest participants don't even regularly edit on it, being more involved in and strongly contributing to other Wikimedia offerings. It's ultimately about open content and free sharing of information, see these two points on the front page of our Wiki: * organise and participate in educational and social events that promote development of Free Cultural Works and related open source software systems, in particular *wikis* * develop resources to assist Australians in the creation and maintenance of Free Cultural Works I believe with the expertise we have here (several educators and subject experts) along with expertise we can bring in (early adopters in particular from schools in various states) we could develop a quality product that would be the envy of the other chapters and would be not only tailored to an Australian school's needs and perspectives, but would also have useful developed work on an appropriate licence (probably CC-BY-SA 3.0) that could be filtered back into the wider Wikimedia's projects - probably of most use to Wikiversity, out of the ones available. cheers Andrew 2009/1/20 Peter Jeremy <[email protected]> > On 2009-Jan-20 12:15:45 +1100, private musings <[email protected]> > wrote: > >I'm aware of quite a few discussions in this area, and believe it's a > great > >direction for the chapter to pursue... it's certainly something that I'm > up > >for working on as a fun and interesting project. > > > >I was chatting with Werdna about how technically we might copy articles > from > >en into a smaller 'collection for schools' > > I have my reservations about the usefulness of this. > > Firstly, I believe this sort of thing needs to be a minimal size to > be of any use - and I think that (eg) the first dozen Oz PMs is too > small. And I'm not sure that WMAU has the resources to identify, > check and copy across enough articles to be worthwhile. > > Secondly, if we do create a 'collection for schools', we wind up with > a fork - updates will not automatically transfer across (in either > direction). Whilst editing articles within a small subset might be > less intimidating than editing articles within 'en', some students > might also feel that they are wasting their time since their efforts > will only have limited distribution. > > As for "writing down" to students - even at primary-school, students > are using "standard" encyclopedias - eg "World Book" or "Britannica". > These are equally aimed above a (high) school curriculum. If there > are articles that are incomprehensible, we should invest our efforts > in improving those articles in-situ, rather than forking articles. > > OTOH, I do agree that some areas of Wikipedia are between PG and R > level and accessing them in a classroom setting could cause "issues". > Maybe it's a pity that mediawiki doesn't have provision for creating > closed subsets - where allowed articles were accessible or editable > as normal but other articles were blocked. > > -- > Peter Jeremy > Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement > an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimediaau-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l > >
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