In case anyone's interested, I've had a conference submission accepted for the Open Educational Resources conference in Manchester this May. http://www.ucel.ac.uk/oer11/ The ambiguity of the title is deliberate.
Title: Wikipedia and Higher Education: Beat them or join them? Conference Theme: Collaboration and communities Abstract: Max. 350 words The presenter works on OER projects in Higher Education, and also in a voluntary capacity for Wikipedia, which aims to bring the world's knowledge to all of humanity. Both efforts are worthwhile, but their reach and impact is very different. I will argue that Wikipedia and its related projects have achieved enormous impact due to cultural factors that are only evident "behind the scenes". These cultural factors, including very high degrees of risk tolerance and individual empowerment, are largely alien to present-day Higher Education and become more so as universities become increasingly managerial. Some attempts to improve on the Wikipedia model, such as Citizendium, lack this special ingredient and enjoy considerably less impact. Universities have entirely different strengths from Wikipedia, but cannot put off the decision of whether they will try to compete with it, work with it for the common good, or work in a complementary way. If they want to be more wiki-like, they need to realise that this is not a matter of mere technological change, or even of individual practice. -- Dr Martin L Poulter ICT Manager, The Economics Network Based at the ILRT, University of Bristol: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ The full experience: http://infobomb.org/ Wikipedia contributor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MartinPoulter Bias research: http://biasandbelief.wordpress.com/ Comedy music: http://www.myspace.com/glandscape Community blog: http://doodznchyx.wordpress.com/ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
