Ec Sig Cormac

Open content and learning on Wikiversity

Cormac LawlerCETIS ECSiG, 27th May 2008

“Openness and inclusiveness are … our radical means to our radical ends.”

Jimmy Wales

Wikiversity

• Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia, Commons, Wikibooks, …) - all dedicated to open content

• Launched August 2006• Lengthy setting-up discussion - what should

it do?

Wikiversity is for..

• Learning materials• Learning activities• Learning communities• (i.e. both a repository of and a space for

learning)• All languages – and levels• All “open” / “free” / “libre”

Open content

• Essential freedoms:• Access (and Use!)• Share (redistribute)• Modify (editing original / copying and

“forking”)• Similar to Stallman/GNU’s open source

freedoms (see freedomdefined.org)

Free culture

• Driven by licensing• Sharing / collaboration / ‘remix’ etc• Culture shift (“anyone can edit my work?”)• Alternative models of production /

consumption (eg. wiki peer review)

Open learning

• Open Educational Resources (OER)• What about open educational spaces?• ‘Architecture for participation’, and an ‘Open

Participatory Learning Infrastructure’ (Atkins, Brown, Hammond)

• Wikiversity explicitly set up to address the question - how does learning work in a wiki? (Wikipedagogy?)

Learning, and the ‘wiki way’

• Collaborative writing• Discussing / debating (sometimes conflict)• Passion-based learning• Transparency of process - info/media-

literacy• Eg. Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia “like a sausage:

you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made”

(I argue the exact opposite!)

Examples from Wikiversity

• Instructor-led materials (Filmmaking)• Reading groups (Ivan Illich)• Collaborative workspaces / writings• Collaborative research (Bloom Clock)

Implications of ‘wiki way’

• Expertise problematic (though not anti-expert)

• Disclosures - what paradigm are you coming from?

• Multiple avenues for learning• Can a resource be “finished”?

Wikiversity’s role

• One of a growing no. of OER repositories• Peer-to-peer university / school (part of

‘meta-university’?)• Personal Learning Environment

Challenges [1]

…for Wikiversity:• ‘My’ content• PLE - is editability always good?• Forking in tension with collaboration• Mediawiki - limited technology?• How permissive are we? (eg. Nazism,

racism?)

Challenges [2]

…in general:• Licence proliferation• Silo effect• Metadata / tagging (searchability)• Open ideology (?)

[email protected]://cormaggio.org

http://en.wikiversity.orghttp://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:Cormaggio