Wlog

From Estigmergia

¿Wlog? wiki + blog

Enlightenment and education for all

After reading the articles regarding some threads of thoughts behind the open educational resource movement (The Age of Enlightenment, Standing on the shoulders of giants, Origins of the public library as a social institution, Popular education, Folk high school and Free software movement), here are some of my thoughts around it:

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--Esenabre 09:11, 20 March 2008 (PDT)

(Re)starting in Wikiversity

From (Re)starting in Wikiversity:

My first contribution to Wikiversity was two years ago, when I added some links to the list in the page Hunter-gatherers project (MIT, Tufts, Utah State University and Tokyo Institute of Technology's open course ware). After setting up an account I first created the list in a more general page (the portal of learning materials), then looked around a little bit more and I finally found the right place where to move the information. And that was it, until one year later! I didn't look for help neither at the chat nor the discussion page, and now I'm thinking about it because I want to consider my experience from its beginnings, and this way try to know better about the project but also my kind of learning/editing style... At that moment I was familiar with those four OER initiatives, then I knew about Wikiversity in Wikipedia, took a look at some of the contents and when I saw that the list of projects was started I decided to create an account and add some to it. I didn't have the clear intention of learning anything after that, I was probably busy as usual and just wanted to contribute since I was already familiar with wiki editing and the way thinks work in Wikipedia. So I was in a kind of "good samaritan" mode :) That's probably why even receiving a message at my talk page from someone about the subject I just forgot about Wikiversity and continued my distributed way of learning somewhere else. But now I think there's also something about the way I learn, and the way I teach too (specially to myself): compared with Wikipedia and maybe other projects focused on creating content, where probably the "productive" mode of users is the usual one, my guess is that related to Wikiversity there are probably the learning mode and the teaching mode.

I was kind of "teaching" then, now I'm in a learning mode and things are different...

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--Esenabre 23:26, 15 March 2008 (PDT)

About Wikiversity

From About Wikiversity:

Wikivesity is a wiki project that defines itself as a learning community, "a communal effort to learn and facilitate others' learning. You can use Wikiversity to find information or ask questions about a subject you need to find out more about. You can also use it to share your knowledge about a subject, and to build learning materials around that knowledge". This happens the wiki way: allowing users to edit and change the content of the site, while they "learn by doing". Its statistics show that it has more than 6,500 resource pages at the moment, plast 42,000 pages that are "talk" pages, pages about Wikiversity, minimal "stub" pages, redirects, and others that probably don't qualify as content pages. It also shows that there have been a total of 219,259 page edits since the wiki was setup (and that comes to 4.53 average edits per page). The wiki is based in MediaWiki, an open source program that has a strong and very active community of developers behind it, that is constantly evolving in terms of new releases and extensions that can be added modularly to improve different aspects of the tool.

Compared to Wikipedia stats, that is based in the same software, Wikiversity' size and activity is quite small, but maybe the important thing to consider here is that Wikiversity's beta phase officially began on 2006 and (more significantly) that it focus on learning materials and educational content, something that requires a more specific motivation (and probably background) than editing an encyclopaedia. However, one could argue that encyclopaedic and talk pages in Wikipedia can be also viewed as resources and places where it's possible to learn in a distributed and free way (from a constructivist point of view), hence consider if some pages in Wikiversity shouldn't directly link to Wikipedia articles.

There are around 3,500 categories in the site, something that compared to resource page figures probably shows how content hasn't been neither much classified nor structured until the moment (the average categories per article is very small, nearly one). The relation between content pages and category could be consider as a way for knowing how much work has to be done in a wiki in order to reach some optimal classification of contents that facilitate the navigation, but also in this case can imply some kind of interoperability between concepts and theories, a cross-referenced way of connecting resources that emulates the basic function of a learning repository. Although there are more 15 major portals, nearly 50 major Schools and several research projects, all of them linked to specific pages that may link to some other Wikiversity pages (that link to other related -or not- contents, and so on), making hypertext the main way of navigating (and learning!) through contents, I wonder if MediaWiki software could ever be as easy to use for searching, locating and remixing OER as Connexions or the OKI architecture.

Does it need to? Or maybe has its own model for collaborative learning, teaching and creating OER? Could be understand and used as a platform for radical constructive learning? Should it focus on learning materials or maybe Wikipedia and Wikibooks can somehow fully provide them? Which ones can be then the best learning/teaching/creative experiences in Wikipedia? All this I'll try to find out soon :)

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--Esenabre 17:42, 8 March 2008 (PST)

Some thoughts around Tuomi 2006

From Some thoughts around Tuomi 2006:

Ilkka Tuomi, in Open Educational Resources: What they are and why do they matter (2006, Report prepared for the OECD), offers a very interesting and complete approach to OER, its definition, the technical, social an pedagogical issues, a wide enumeration of some wide known projects in the field and some other concepts that I would like to comment:

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--Esenabre 00:42, 8 March 2008 (PST)

Hi there oercourse!

From Hi there oercourse!:

(This is a personal presentation, a first activity for the course Composing free and open online educational resources, here is the course blog, here the Wikiversity page, which I'm happy to start today).

My name is Enric, I have a quite mixed background after some years studying, working and researching around technology and teaching, and a previous experience of 4 years teaching Spanish as a second language. Nowadays I work as technical coordinator for the Observatorio para la CiberSociedad and CitiLab-Cornellà in Barcelona (Catalonia > Spain :)

Well, here is my video-presentation...

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--Esenabre 03:28, 4 March 2008 (PST)

Our home wiki

From Our home wiki:

I've installed a wiki in our kitchen, a blackboard default one in black color. I've added the calendar extension to it, and it works quite well...

It has four registered users at the moment (and some occasional ones, that add content when they visit us) but two of them are vandals that constantly try to reach the top levels (where the crucial information for our daily development resides). They have chairs, and other ways to get there, and their only aim is to delete and draw with many different colors!

We had before a more static system on a white surface, where we used magnets for attaching information and some basic characters, but since we have the new system no-one edits it anymore.

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--Esenabre 15:57, 22 October 2007 (PDT)

Wiki presentation

From Wiki presentation:

This September I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the University of York, during the Towards a Social Science of web 2.0, about some of the findings and reflexions related to my research interest in Wikipedia and wikis. Although I'm not very happy about how did I talk (or about my loudly spoken English, I rather say :) I think I found a quite interesting way for doing presentations using a wiki.

What I did was to prepare the slides in MS PowerPoint as usual (with a grey status bar, more useful in my opinion than page numbers), and then inspired by the MediaWiki Slideshow extension I decided to do it in a wiki way that could allow the content to be incremented/modified as well as commented. The final trick was to show it all in a printable version (with a default wiki skin, not the current one), so after a lot of tedious hiperlinking I had a clean presentation I can edit and edit and reuse and add references until it becomes The Presentation :)

You can take a look at it here: Stigmergy, meritocracy and vandalism in peer-production: how can wikis grow

Although the title (and the abstract, and the presentation itself!) is a little bit ambitious, it's about the basic features and advantages of wikis, and the way Wikipedia evolved in terms of process, community and similarities with Open Source developments.

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--Esenabre 16:49, 11 October 2007 (PDT)