Questions about Wikiversity
This post continues the discussion about distributed action research and wikiversity from DARnet interview part two and DARnet-interview-part 1 with Cormac Lawler
Cormac wrote:
About changing of groups’ structure over time, I think my own domain (Wikiversity) is showing an increasingly strong tension along the lines of making Wikiversity a place of ‘blue-sky’ or experimental learning versus an alignment to known pedagogical forms. See http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki /Wikiversity_talk:Learning resources#the_wiki_way.3F and below for some discursive material on this topic. It’s perhaps not an example of a change of guard as such (and the debate within Wikiversity’s development is not new), but I’m starting to see the tension as a pretty fundamental one for Wikiversity.
Reading that discussion again on the Wikiversity page, it strikes me
that both sides of the tension referred to are in fact agreed upon
working within the same framework. The dispute, if I’m not mistaken is
over the nature and quality of the learning resources which are to be
accumulated in the Wikiversity. Neither side appears to be questioning
the basic model of education based on learning from supplied content.
The references to ‘experimental’ forms seem to remain within
experimental forms of content provision, without questioning that
preconception. Despite the claim that
“Wikiversity has adopted a “learn by doing” model for education”
the doing appears to consist entirely of editing pages to create more
resources.
Do you think a bias towards conventional content based learning is
built in to the wiki way?
How might other learning processes be facilitated through Wikiversity?
I’m thinking of the newer emerging learning models such as
connectivism, which would place the emphasis on the network between
people and the community above content. This might require additional
tools to the document based wiki, but needn’t be entirely separate.
I’m not predicting the splitting into groups, as you say, but I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Indeed, I see the role of my own action research to explicitly throw into relief the sometimes conflicting viewpoints that people bring to the project – in order to reveal something deeper about what we’re doing, and how we can move forward with a simultaneously more critical and expansive mindset.
Thanks for initiating this
