Cormac’s blog

Wikipedia has already created a new type of academic community - one in which people can freely contribute as much or as little as they like in their own time, and about subjects they are passionate about. Furthermore, I think contributing to Wikipedia is itself a learning process - for various people this can include: how to find and cite sources; improving literacy and proficiency in a language; how to deal with copyright issues; and how to collaborate with other people, some of whom you may deeply disagree with.

This is Wikipedia as a process rather than as a resource - I’ve written a resource that could be used to educate people about what happens “Inside Wikipedia” (see also slides I previously uploaded to LeMill), and I think more needs to be done in this regard, especially since people are increasingly visiting Wikipedia for information, and because it affords so much in raising awareness about information and media literacy. In order to understand and validate Wikipedia as a resource, we need to understand the process by which it is constructed. This does not simply mean we need to be wary of Wikipedia (we need to be critical of any piece of information) - and indeed, some of the material on Wikipedia is of a higher quality than anything else of its kind out there precisely because of its radically open model.

My dream has always been that Wikiversity would take up and expand this model. Wikiversity’s scope is far bigger than Wikipedia’s - and it suffers in some ways precisely because of this. I’ve heard people saying that Wikipedia is easy to understand because we know what an encyclopedia generally looks like (even though Wikipedia, of course, redefines or expands the definition of an encyclopedia), but that Wikiversity is too vaguely defined. This does bother me, but I also see it as an opportunity (and I always have done) - to remain open to new models, forms and ways of learning that are not simply of the format: develop resource; read resource; answer/discuss questions. I think there is still much work to do in understanding how open, connected and collaborative work can be embedded within educational practice - though, obviously there is already a huge amount of foundational and related work done across many academic fields.

In short, to summarise how I see Wikimedia and the free culture movement impacting on education, it involves:

* Giving people access to spaces in which they can share, discuss, and question their knowledge
* Developing open peer review models around this knowledge
* Improving awareness about how knowledge is constructed
* Framing and critiquing knowledge in a learning context (and giving people access to this open learning context)
* Developing peer review models around these learning contexts
* Improving awareness about how learning works

Wikipedia is already opening the world’s eyes to the first three; my hope is that Wikiversity (and others) will do likewise for the last three.

(Some more thoughts on issues in this post are in my two Wikimania papers, “Wikipedia as a learning community”, and “Learning and learning about learning in Wikiversity”.)