Leigh Blackall has just pointed to Wikiversity, a community hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.
He and Bronwyn Hegarty from Otago Polytech have taken the initiative of building a new course on Wikiversity – Facilitating Online. They envisage starting with material suitable for novice facilitators to help them relate the information and ideas in their own situations. They would like then to move into the advanced stuff such as facilitating and communicating in communities, discussion lists, games, second life, with robots etc. This is a great contribution to open free content!
What I love about the whole Wikiversity idea is that learners and teachers are invited to join, it is multi-lingual (now in Spanish, German and English but more languages should join) and also there are a lot of sister projects, like:
| Wikipedia Free-content encyclopedia |
Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus |
Wikiquote Collection of quotations |
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| Wikinews Free-content news |
Wikispecies Directory of species |
Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals |
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| Wikisource Free-content library |
Commons Shared media repository |
I am definitely envisaging doing something about it next year in the EFL area and engaging some students. Anyone interested?
Hi Bee 🙂
We have started working with a few Departments here – using wikiversity firstly as a tool to audit content. Staff go through their existing online content, then use the wiki format (which is nice and straight forward) to copy paste into based on what they think is reusable (watching for copyright and other issues).
So far we have one unit from the Business Department Business Writing Skills (note the use of creative commons image) and soon will have many more business related topics in, as well as International Toursim.
I have my own Networked Learning resources in there too.
It will be very interesting to see the wikiversity community response – and if multi lingual collabroation will happen.
Interesting post.
Apologies for cross posting, but I have just created a new esl superblog where your blog has been included for its quality and pedagogical interest.
http://eslblog.suprglu.com/
(I hope you don’t mind. If you do, please tell me)
hi Bee, this is interesting because “the future of CALL” was one of my topicss discussed in my thesis which I just finished…hese is the link: http://www.yousendit.com/download/QyiBM0tjBId5TA%3D%3D
I didn’t find a lot written about it which mad it more appealing to me…I hadn’t found wikiversity but if I have time can discuss it when I have my thesis discussion…
thanks for your news
Susan B in Florence
excuse me on all thos h o r r i b l e spelling errors…..must be the football match (Kakà is playing in MILAN, you know…..)
😉 Susan