Cormac’s blog

Wikiversity is one of many sites devoted to open educational resources. MIT’s OpenCourseWare was (I think) the first large initiative to create open educational resources - it’s a fantastic initiative and resource - the only drawback being that its content is released under a “non-commercial” (NC) Creative Commons licence (meaning that it can never be used in Wikimedia projects, which explicitly require this freedom). However, its work has sparked a movement, and this has begun to involve many other universities - under the OpenCourseWare Consortium. Some of this content is released under NC licences, but many of it is being made more free. In fact, I’ve discussed this with Andy Lane of the UK Open University’s OpenLearn project, who described the process as a ‘wedge-like’ device for getting university academic staff to think about making their content more available. Content can be made progressively more free - so something that is released under a non-commercial licence can be relicenced with more freedoms (eg, in licence-speak, CC-NC-BY can be relicenced as CC-BY).

I’ve also met Richard Baraniuk, and other members of the Connexions project (in fact, I’ve had a tour of their offices!) - and I have to say they’re inspiring people behind an inspiring project. In their quest of making educational content freely accessible, Connexions also has a really powerful technical structure behind the idea. This is largely driven by XML - which, as Richard says in his TED talk, “turn(s) pages [of books] into lego blocks”, allowing people to build books “on demand”, according to their own needs, and perhaps to see connections between books and subjects (I’m sure the pun is intended). From our meeting, there was a collaboration between Connexions and Wikiversity in the offing, but which unfortunately stalled in the planning/funding phase. However, I’d still like to revive it at some stage…

LeMill is another good example of a repository of resources - findable, remixable etc - but what’s really nice is their separation between learning: content, methods and tools. LeMill is trying to make explicit the different ways in which a subject can be taught and learned, and what tools (eg software) can be used to do so. I think this is an important aspect of all this work - that we try to avoid the notion of ‘handing down content to the world’ (a form of “cultural imperialism”, according to Richard Baraniuk), and that we also recognise the multitude of ways in which we learn (and teach).

All of the above sites have well-organised means of searching and tagging materials - but this is somewhere that Wikiversity is seriously lacking. The search within MediaWiki has long been lamented (Mayflower on Commons is an improvement, but not at all fully functional), and our only way of tagging and structuring material is through categorising pages, and manually creating structuring pages and templates, requiring a lot of dogwork, and still not creating anything like as powerful as what other sites offer. Perhaps Wikiversity can make use of semantic mediawiki and/or other tools - and I’m currently thinking and trying to develop discussion about Wikiversity’s technical needs and how they could be addressed. This is something that I would like to get some feedback from Wikimedia/Mediawiki developers - a community who, even though we are all part of the same ‘meta-community’, I feel we are at arm’s length from in Wikiversity. This is a serious advantage of other sites - in that they have dedicated staff to carry out specific tasks - and this is just not the case in a voluntary community/organisation like Wikimedia. However, I’d like to start addressing this issue as a ‘meta-community’ and form a closer dialogue around technical needs and technical solutions. Any input would be very much appreciated - perhaps on Wikiversity:Technical needs.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 3:02 pm and is filed under Wikiversity, Technology, oercourse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.