Wikiversity is one of the Wikimedia Foundation's project related to direct education and research. Its goals were to create and host free educational materials and activities and host learning and research communities. No guidelines how such "educational material" or "community hosting" should look like were established, nor policies for research. For the last five years its participants were using knowledge and imagination overstepping both software and communication related problems. Nowadays there are thousands of pages in Wikiversity and some conflicts which brokenspined stones.
In this presentation Jan will present Wikiversity's content across different language versions, describing it and evaluating. In some cases, content focused conflicts between Wikiversity community and other non-Wikiversity Wikimedians, will be presented placing against each other thoughts about such content. Jan will show, that "typic" on-line courses, which would be expected on Wikiversity compose just a small percentage of all Wikiversity content. It more like consists of student assignments, notes, personal research, pages imitating "school" structure units, lectures, chats and forums, quizzes and other activities (Wiki Campus Radio, Wiki-Wiki magazine etc.). Also examples of communities and research project will be presented.
Jan will coin the idea that not just technical obstacles, but also the fact, that Wikiversity is people-focused project (thus open-minded?), while other WMF's projects are only contend-focused, brings problems. Possible scenarios for the future of Wikiversity, and Wikiversity community will be described, regarding the questions like: Why Wikiversity is not respected by Wikimedians?, Is there a parallel between Wikimedia and Communist Czechoslovakia?, etc.
Presentation will be presented directly from Wikiversity (if possible), so audience will have the possibility to study it on-line – write notes and questions and collaborate on possible future scenarios.
This page was last edited on 21 November 2011, at 13:05.