Wikiversity is a proposed project to create a university that will bring together a community of learners and teachers by making use of wiki software.
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Collaboration between learners and teachers.
Historical origins of wikiversity
There is an interesting phenomenon by which new wikis are created from old ones. Often, an existing wiki serves as an incubator for new wikis. This has been the case for Wikipedia. Wikibooks started in the summer of 2003 as a daughter project of Wikipedia.
In our culture, there are many people who succeed by being narrow specialists. There are people who are always in a rush to narrow the focus of existing wikis and sterilize them to remove everything that does not fit a narrow definition of the purpose of the wiki. The alternative approach is to foster diversity and build resilient communities from the combined efforts of diverse members. However, it is a sociological phenomenon that those people who feel the need to narrowly specialize will focus their energies and find ways to exclude anyone/anything that does not fit a narrow definition of a wiki’s mission. The birth of Wikibooks from Wikipedia was even accompanied by gloating about how the new project was so poorly developed that in September 2003 Wikibooks did not even merit a wikipedia entry[1]. This sociological phenomenon by which wikis are driven to eat their own offspring also applies to the birth of Wikiversity from Wikibooks.
The origins of Wikiversity
Soon after the creation of Wikibooks, there was already discussion at Wikibooks of the idea of creating a Wikiversity as part of the Wikibooks project. There was also discussion of the wikiversity concept at the Wikimedia Meta Wiki in 2003 including the comment, “Wikibooks would be the bookstore of WikiU?”
The narrow Wikibooks mission is to use a wiki interface to produce textbooks. There have been different visions of just what a textbook is. Many people view a textbook as a collection of facts that students read and memorize so that they can pass their exams. In this model, producing a textbook is a matter of a group of wiki users collecting the facts all in one place. The easy way to do this is to simply copy the contents of an existing textbook for a particular subject.
An alternative conceptualization of a textbook is that it is a learning aid, produced by people who make use of their understanding of a subject in order to produce a guide for new-comers to a field. In this model, producing a textbook requires knowledgeable authors who know the state of mind of a target audience and how to lead that audience through a large and complex subject. If this model is valid, then textbook production in a wiki environment depends on supporting the needs of knowledgeable textbook authors. Historically, this has been accomplished by making textbook writing a recognized form of scholarly activity in universities. Thus, it makes sense to have a "wikiversity" as part of Wikibooks. Wikiversity would attract scholars who would then write the textbooks.
However, it is easier to construct individual wiki textbooks using the Wikipedia method of "article construction". This has led to such textbooks as "Rubik's Cube", "The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker" and "JAGS-2" but not a Neuroscience textbook.
In the absence of community support for the people who can write textbooks, Wikiversity went into a holding pattern from 2003 to 2005. Some people have argued that there needs to be special new software support for a wikiversity. For example, some people view tests and exams as the core of a university, so they argue that Wikiversity needs online testing software before it can start. From 2003 to 2005 very little development of Wikiversity took place. A list of academic disciplines was made. A few "course" were started, often by linking a "wikiversity course page" to an online textbook or pages at Wikipedia.
In August of 2005, a few guardians of Wikibooks could no longer stand to have Wikiversity present within the Wikibooks project. The wikiversity main page was listed as a candidate for deletion from Wikibooks. This led to the hasty creation of a Wikiversity project proposal at the Meta Wiki. At this time (October 2005) voting is taking place to decide if there is enough community support for Wikiversity to have the Wikimedia Foundation debate the merits of starting Wikiversity as a new daughter project.
Debate over wikiversity as a Wikimedia project
During the time that wikiversity was being removed from the Wikibooks project, there was some discussion of the pros and cons of having wikiversity as a Wikimedia project.
The Name
Depending on their rate of cognitive development, students may be ready for Wikiversity as early as age 14.
Some people object to the name "wikiversity". It has been suggested that the name "wikiversity" is too centered on higher education and that the project should also include content that is for less advanced students. In the "learning as collaboration" model of wiki-assisted learning, each student must take responsibility for their education and utilization of available online resources. It is not clear that the youngest students can fruitfully participate in an online learning experience in a wiki environment. Developmental psychologists such as Erik Erikson have attempted to characterize stages in human cognitive development. In Piaget's theory of cognitive development, the capacity for abstract thinking and drawing conclusions from collections of information does not usually develop until after age 12. According to Erikson, children learn to interact constructively with peer groups during the period from age 12 to 18. It can also be argued that these are important social skills that need to be learned in the "real world" where all sensory modalities can be utilized, not under the restricted conditions of sensory deprivation that apply to online communities.
Content
There is also confusion about what constitutes appropriate educational content for a university. "University" is derived from the Latin “universitas”, which is short for "universitas magistrorum et scholarium", meaning roughly "community of masters and scholars". According to David C. Lindberg in his book "The beginnings of western science", "guild" is a good term to use to describe such a "community of masters and scholars". The idea of teachers and students banding together was part of the movement towards trades and crafts forming what came to be known as guilds. When the first universities were formed, elementary education included language skills and basic mathematics. The entry level of university education eventually evolved into what we know as a liberal arts education. Originally, a typical age for starting participation in university education was about 14. Typical undergraduate topics were philosophy and "advanced" mathematics such as geometry. Students might typically learn astronomy and astrology according to Ptolemy. This is the level of education that is today found in American High Schools. It should be expected that as High School students mature cognitively and socially they will be able to participate in Wikiversity. Some more precocious students from pre-High School grades may also benefit from Wikiversity.
Accreditation and Degrees
Another issue has been the idea that it is the business of a university to be accredited to confer formal degrees. These are trappings of a modern university, but only slowly evolved as practices of established universities. From the earliest times, many university students received the education they needed without attaining a degree. High School students will use Wikiversity to prepare for Advanced Placement tests. Wikiversity will become a center for adult learning within which many adult students will not be interested in attaining degrees. Accreditation and degree conferring is certainly not needed in order to start the Wikiversity project.
Distraction from other projects
It has been suggested that other projects such as Wikibooks need to be given support first and that starting a new project like Wikiversity is a distraction and would result in a dilution of talent. Such zero-sum thinking assumes that the same people who are currently developing wikibooks will be the people who participate in wikiversity. An alternative view is that the desired textbooks will only be produced after Wikiversity is established, as discussed above on this page. It has also been suggested that hardware resources are rate limiting for Wikimedia projects and that new projects would drain server resources from existing projects, crippling them. This is an unsubstantiated claim. As more people are brought into contact with Wikimedia projects, the pool of donors increases. Education is one area where people are willing to spend money. There is no reason to expect that wikiversity could not be supported by user donations.
Wiki in Education
You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it for himself. -Galileo Galilei
There are many different conceptualizations of how Wikiversity can or should take form. Some people view students as empty containers to be filled with knowledge from a source (teacher, courseware). If you adopt such a traditional model of learning, then you can be tempted to try to construct a factory-like university in wiki format. In the model of learning as a collaborative effort, the student is responsible for being an active agent exploring a learning environment. Such a model leads us to take full advantage of the wiki user interface to unite learners and teachers in a community that is devoted to research, information exchange and creativity.
Recreating the university in wiki format
Schools of Thought
In the past, an attempt has been made to organize wikiversity around conventional academic divisions. This makes sense as a starting point for wikiversity, but it does not mean that wikiversity must remain trapped in conventional approaches to learning. One of the great opportunities for wikiversity is that instructors will be free to abandon traditional categorizations of human knowledge and offer alternative ways of learning about the world. For example, a strong case can be made for placing human tool use and technology at the center of an intellectual analysis of the human condition. The true power of wikiversity might be in the construction of "Portals" that are similar in character to the topic portals of wikipedia (example: [[wikipedia:Portal:Biology|Biology Portal]). In constructing a wikiversity portal, an instructor (or, hopefully, a cooperating group of instructors and students) will be able to provide students with a coherent strategy for making sense of the world, a launch platform that will appeal to certain students and allow them to explore the world from a certain perspective using certain organizing principles. Such portals will probably be the "schools of thought" that will attract students, particularly if they build on the best information available and point students towards viable strategies for living constructive lives in the future.
The role of research
The role of research in a university is a source of endless debate. "Research" can be placed in the more general category of "scholarly activity". The members of a university community should be engaged in scholarly activities. There are many activities that are scholarly, for example, creating a textbook. This is why it is perfectly sensible for wikiversity to exist within the wikibooks project. Many textbooks are produced by members of a university who are performing their obligatory duty to take part in scholarly activity.
The term "research" actually gets used in two different ways. There is "original research" in which investigators try to discover something new about the world. There is also "literature research", which is fundamental to many forms of scholarly activity, including textbook writing. Wikiversity will utilize resources such as textbooks and such resources depend on scholarly "literature research". Such research involves going into the "literature" (use a broad definition of "literature") in order to learn what others have accomplished in the past. A key reason why research is central to a university is that the students get to exist within a community where the members are actively engaged in the process of doing research. This is how students learn to do research. This is how the cultural heritage of research is passed from generation to generation.
For people who imagine preventing Wikiversity from including research, two types of institutions of "higher education" come to mind. First would be some kind of technical training institute where the students do not need to learn to think, only how to put patches on flat tires. There are such institutions that pass themselves off as institutions of higher education, but it is a scam. Second, you could have an indoctrination center where students are forced to learn some corpus of propaganda and original thought is actively suppressed. Some political and religious institutions shun free enquiry and adopt the strategy of indoctrination. Again, I find it distasteful to call these "institutions of higher learning", but they do exist. Such institutions that avoid or restrain research activity within their communities are not what Wikiversity should become.
The distinction between "original research" and "literature research" is blurry and mainly a matter of emphasis. Hopefully anyone doing "literature research" is being just as creative as anyone else and making discoveries and creating new knowledge from old. That's why universities recognize activities such as textbook writing as being a valuable scholarly activity as is dicovering a cure for some disease. Why try to exclude any form of scholarly research from Wikiversity? With respect to "original research" such as that conducted in expensive research laboratories (example: human genome project) or in the field (example:space exploration) there is no reason why wikiversity could not host a wiki "virtual research space" that would hold information about every research project that exists in the world. Eventually, some researchers are going to open up their research laboratories to the world and put everything they do into wiki format. Wikiversity could strive to become a "host" for virtual labs through which research becomes open to the world.
References
- ^ See this: Wikipedia history page.
See also
External Links
- Temporary home of Wikiversity at the wikibooks project.