Wikipedia now has 272 languages. I'd like to invite World University & School into the same sphere of web thought as Wikipedia, but specifically with 8000 languages - all know human languages, most widely construed, for translation, research and archival reasons.
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About Wikipedia, in brief:
"On 15 January 2001 Wikipedia contained the words ‘Hello World!' posted by its founder Jimmy Wales. Nine years on, the site has grown rapidly to contain over 14,000,000 articles in more than 272 languages and to become one the Web’s top ten most visited sites. One of the world’s largest collaborative and reference sites, mobilising more than 85,000 active contributors, it attracts around 65 million visitors on a montly basis."
http://ow.ly/XS5E
A wealth of knowledge in 272 languages: More so, an experiment in engaging with lifelong and open learning - Interviewing Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia and its role in the world of OERs
Mon, 18/01/2010 - 03:05 | by giotaalevizou
On 15 January 2001 Wikipedia contained the words ‘Hello World!' posted by its founder Jimmy Wales. Nine years on, the site has grown rapidly to contain over 14,000,000 articles in more than 272 languages and to become one the Web’s top ten most visited sites. One of the world’s largest collaborative and reference sites, mobilising more than 85,000 active contributors, it attracts around 65 million visitors on a montly basis.
As a reference site, Wikipedia’s status is far from consensual. Some are skeptical of its credibility and authority, potentially compromised by its open publishing model, user anonymity and lack of centralized editorial control (e.g. Duguid, 2006; Keen, 2007). Others celebrate its potential for the very same reasons – anyone can contribute – and they note the provision of novel modes of expertise and peer review as guarantees of credibility (e.g. Benkler, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; 2007, Rosenzweig, 2006). Addressing controversies, the Wikipedia community recognizes its weaknesses and provides useful guidelines for information literacy. More importantly, several strategies exist to improve not only the content quality of the reference material, but also expanding the mission of the Wikimedia Foundation with additional content through the cohort of its topical (Wikinews), education projects (Wikibooks, Wikiversity) and supportive media archives (Wikimedia commons, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wiktionary).
@TylerT Created for the WikiMedia Foundation strategic planning process
The position of Wikipedia and the cohort of Wikimedia projects within the Open Education Resource movement is central; a testament of this is the inclusion of Wikipedia in Hewlett Foundation’s OER Overview and in Wikieducator’s OER Handbook. And while numerous initiatives exist to mobilize partnerships with cultural institutions, content holders (e.g. Wikipedia Loves Art), and disciplinary experts (see Neuroscience Wikipedia Initiative), cross content fertilization with other OERs (for example with Fotopedia, Encyclopedia of Life, Wikieducator) is also at the core of the project.
One of first most tantalizing aspects of the Wikipedia effect for me – a long standing researcher of the worlds of reference, new media and education systems –firstly focused on collective intelligence and on the transparent mediation of the turmoil surrounding in the social production of knowledge; I soon realized that Wikipedia ‘s value rests too in mediating openness and free resources; crucially, the openness in the process of learning how to aggregate, remix, prod-use and freely distribute resources.
I have met Jimmy Wales at several events and conferences promoting Wikipedia or speaking about the politics and ethics of openness or the nature of self-organizing knowledge and learning communities. Apart from Wale’s longstanding positions within Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, his role within the Open Education movement is widely documented, not least for his involvement in meetings that produced The Cape Town Open Education Declaration; His view like others, involves a vision of open education linking teaching with learning and the collaborative cultures of the Internet. It includes creating and sharing materials used in teaching as well as new approaches to learning where people create and shape knowledge together: “everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn” he’s been cited saying before.
What follows below is part of a conversation on Olnet and open education we had a while ago in London.
G.: What do you think is the position of Wikipedia in education, as an OER?
J.: It plays two major roles, and there are other roles of course… First, a supplement to traditional learning materials, pretty much the same way as any traditional encyclopaedia would be. Now you are taking a course and you need some background information, or an overview or summary and get that from us. And the other, and perhaps more interesting, is a role that was partially fulfilled in the past by the traditional encyclopaedia, which is for informal learning. But now, this has exploded beyond anything we might have imagined. In no small part because Wikipedia has such a comprehensive coverage of topics of general interest that aren’t necessarily high culture. So, people can go to Wikipedia and start to learn about the history of [wondering] say, 1960s rock and roll music. And there’s massive amount of information, more than you would find in the old encyclopaedia. Also there’s more scope for contemporary pop culture … all kinds of things people are interested in. And are interested in engaging with in a serious way, but aren’t traditionally considered ‘proper’ topics. But also all the proper topics are there, science history, current affairs. But informal learning, is one the major changes, I think, that the internet has brought us …it’s a completely new type of tool for the lifelong learning process.
G.: How would you describe the position of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation within the OER movement?
J.: Because Wikipedia itself has such a huge body of information that’s under a free license, I think we are in a very good position for people to reuse our work in more formal and more structured educational resources. If you look up Wikipedia, yes it has lots of information, but there are really times that you want accomplishment and achievement either for a certification that a university might give or just for my own personal desire. And it might be useful to be able to say ‘oh I successfully passed a basic knowledge course, so I feel comfortable that I know about ….say the ‘History of 1960s Rock and Roll’… I can dig around on Wikipedia for ever right? But maybe I want an expert to organize it, say in the form of a quiz at the end of each article, asking ‘did you get the main points out of it? ‘ That could be constructed quite easily from using Wikipedia content in a layer on top of it.
So, that’s one aspect. There are things that aren’t very useful in an OER context. For example one of my interest is …. I was studying German and now I am studying Spanish … and I have looked around…and really Wikipedia is not very useful for a foreign language learner. If I am studying German and I want to read German Wikipedia, it’s too hard for me… In Wikibooks there’s some German textbooks, but last time I looked it was quite limited and boring and a long way from being useful. What really works for education, for language learning, it’s not a textbook, it’s an interactive environment and so we are a long way from that.
We are part of the OER community by default because of what we are. We have the wikibooks projects, which if fine, but we are trying to write textbooks using the same software to write that we use to write Wikipedia… And the software itself has certain default assumptions that are designed around the workflow for producing an encyclopaedia and it doesn’t support some of the other kinds of things you would want for an educational environment. It’s not an ideal system for this purpose.
G.: Yeah to work around tools that would support the representation of learning activities and design
J.: Exactly. We haven’t had the resources to be able to do that….nor has it been our main focus….We can wish we had more resources, but that’s the way it is.
G.: There’s another thing about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation. They have been exemplifying how they can mobilize synergies between ordinary people generating content and cultural institutions, like museums, or other public domain content holders. Do you think that the OER community can work more on mobilizing such synergies?
J.: I think it should. More people can get involved and there is a need to mobilize more people. At the same time in our free licensing world, we don’t need to have too much replication of effort. Once Wikipedia finds a way to get good quality, freely licensed images of historic artwork, no-one else needs to go out and do it again, because it’s all there in Wikimedia commons and it’s all set already. So you can take it and use and we are happy about that … But I do think that one of the great successes of Wikipedia is that it is a community and a lot of things happen because of these large communities out there supporting each other and coming out with ideas and executing them without a lot of top down control. And the more we can generate a sense of an OER community of people just working together, there’re a lot of possibilities that don’t involve formal institutional collaboration, but lots of individuals doing interesting things and seeking out other individuals doing interesting things, without really making it formal and institutional.
G.: Wikipedia has been a test-bed for experimentation for autodidacts and self-learners who begin by reading and then they feel the urge to start contributing. What do you think are the components that make participation engaging in that sense?
J.: What I hear from people, anecdotally without any serious study of it, and by the general sense that I get… Most people enjoy the process for two reasons. One they engage with the knowledge of the subject matter they are interested in…I met this woman, she’s very active in Wikipedia, she’s a biology PhD, and she’s studies snails, she’s involved in the wikiproject snails, they are writing all about snails, and so she’s really in to this subject matter. And she’s very engaged with that and she enjoys the information that she’s working with, because that’s her life’s work…the other reasons are more social: people are in it in full, because they get to meet other interesting people and interact with them, they make friends, they make enemies … That’s what keeps people interested.
And of course, sometimes, there’s an element of social validation … You do something and someone thanks you for it, and you realize that you have been recognized, by people who you like, as doing good work and that feels good. So those kinds of things and also the third thing is the ideological or political motivation you might say where people very passionately believe in the vision of a free encyclopaedia for everyone in every language. And that vision – I don’t think it sustains the every day-to-day work – but it’s a piece of what you feel good about at the end of the day. And it helps you go through some boring moments. Doing some boring chores, that are not in themselves fun, but you feel like OK, ‘look, in the bigger world, I am doing something that I really believe in and if I have to sit here for three hours doing a tedious task, I can through it because it’s not about just having fun, it’s about doing something big and important in the world that I can be part of’.
G.: Several educators invite their students to come to the site and contribute as a part of a learning exercise. Some claim that they test creativity, negotiation skills and critical literacy skills, Do you think experiments like these could be an additional model for OERs?
J.: Yes I do. I think within the Wikipedia world, many of these types of projects are done with undergraduates. It works well if they are given enough background and enough guidance …. Sometimes it’s worked very poorly….if someone says ‘tonight your task is to go and edit Wikipedia’ and they have no idea of what to do and they come and sort of misbehave and get in trouble, that’s not a very helpful experience for anyone. But with OERs, what’s very interesting, is the value for people you are in – this is where I see it come become very effective – people who are entering a graduate level teachers, professional teachers, not just pure academics, people who’ve gotten their undergrad degree and now are pursuing a teaching graduate degree to become more professional…So they have classroom experience with the relevant age-level of kids. And now in their studies they are beginning to think in a bigger way about the construction of learning resources … What better way to think about that, rather than to engage in it? …. So you can imagine a class project or a series of class projects where your task is to perhaps edit a sixth grade math test and think about the design of it and engage and doing it. And other people in the next semester can build what’s already there … or another class in another place can do it.
Because one thing that I think is necessary for OERs that’s a little bit different from an encyclopaedia, is some pedagogical expertise. Everyone understands what an encyclopaedia article is as an adult. What people don’t always have a good intuition about, is what is needed to teach say chemistry for a university chemistry class…That takes more expertise and more experience. And this is where I think for OERs to become successful is to have explicit learning designs.
And one of the interesting things and great opportunities here, is that currently with traditional resources, the cycle feedback and improvement is quite week and quite slow. At the end of the semester …if you really hated the textbook you might write an email and complain. …. There’s not a lot of feedback loop and the number of people improving it is very small…But imagine a big group of 50-100 people who are teaching 1st year level undergrad chemistry all working from the same OER and all being engaged in a serious dialogue through the semesters and improving it in real time and being able to discuss it and say ‘look, this particular chapter - we found that – students perform very poorly either because the tests/activities were not structured well or the chapter was not good …what’s wrong, what are the people missing, how can we improve it? 'And by speeding that feedback we might get better materials out very quickly.
G.: So you think that dialogical and social networking tools should be embedded with specific OERs, within particular subjects, or teaching communities?
J.: I think so, and in part because …. I think with an encyclopaedia article, everybody that comes to it is sort of within an experimental subject … they read it and whether they are not satisfied or not, they have the chance to respond immediately. Whereas with a more structured learning environment you really need to engage people more. Because without that kind of direct feedback I think it’s very slow to realize that a mistake has been made.
G.: There's a general consensus that more explicit learning and interactivity need to be embedded in OERs , but the idea of engaging teachers using particular OERs or particular subjects within an OER to talk to each other and share ideas proves challenging in implementation
J.: it’s one thing to say, oh I have been using this and I am going to go and leave feedback on a message board and no-one is there….there’s a lot of barriers or it’s very cumbersome …. as opposed to feel emotionally involved … ‘I am part of this’ and getting people to get to use this and leave some feedback, it may not lead to very much to something like ‘I am actually empowered, I have the necessary skills to be able to actually engage, contribute something … or actually rewrite a paragraph and it will be adopted ….I think that’s a challenge … not an insurmountable challenge, but there are some limitations right now….
G.: What do you think are the key issues that will affect the impact of OERs
J.: I think broadly, it’s going to be a lot easier at the university level, rather than for younger students….simply because professors have a lot more latitude in selecting materials to use and it’s less bureaucratic world …. One of the problems we have in generating a large volunteer movement in creating textbooks and other learning materials for children, is that volunteers work in part on the premise that’s it’s going to be used … I write something on WP somebody is going to read it …if I write in Wikibooks or for CK-12 a text for 6th graders, I am not sure how many people are going to use, if they are going to find it … it’s not approved by whatever standards bodies …. That’s a huge hurdle for generating a large body of volunteers… But at university level you don’t have that problem. I mean, particularly we do more outreach to professors if get those chemistry professors to volunteer, they know it’s going to be used because they are going to be ones using it.
G.: Maybe targeting professors and teachers in specialized conferences and mailing lists, communication outlets that they use for their particular discipline and maybe also run training programmes
J.: Yeah, one of the interesting and challenging things are how do you find those audiences in a place where we can connect to them in a reasonable cost and put them together … sort of create the spark …. There’s also different types of educational conferences, workshops. One of the major of the opportunities is transforming education in the developing world by making materials available freely for people to re-use and adapt in their own contexts. So there’s an opportunity if it’s proven to be lower cost, superior motive production that a lot of funding may come from state governments … for any government really. For the State of California for example, the incentive is to see at economic model of open source software and see, because they already pay for these ridiculous prices for textbooks. And even if the schools aren’t supplying these, the burden is not students, through grants and loans…if we can show that the cost is lower and superior or equivalent quality.
ow.ly/XS5E
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2010/01/lonicera-sempervirens-wikipedia-now-has.html - January 18, 2010)
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