User talk:Bjoern/oer.educ
Hi Bjoern, at first glance at least, it looks like some of these issues are specific to the project, while others are of wider importance to the Wikimedia movement and Mediawiki as a platform. It would probably be useful to have some indication what the significance and use case of each would be so that the impact can be best assessed. Sjgknight (talk) 08:50, 25 March 2014 (UTC)
Why?
Hi Bjoern. Thanks for posting this. There's lots of different issues here that may be worth the tech committee exploring, but I think the most important question that needs answering first is: why should Wikimedia UK be putting effort into/caring about these issues? To be more specific, what would the Wikimedia movement gain from tackling these technical issues, and why does the content here need a separate wiki rather than being made available directly on the Wikimedia projects? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:05, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
Some thoughts on that
Hi Mike! Many thanks for the question! We feel that mediawiki could be a great platform for collaboratively producing and hosting teacher education resources. For instance, IMHO, mediawiki comes pretty close to being an excellent platform for open textbooks (whether these are teacher education resources or otherwise). However, there are some things that are missing, see https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/User:Bjoern/oer.educ (as mentioned).
This includes facilities for page headers, better searching (our users didn't like the current search), better section numbering etc. If wikibooks had those features, then (especially considering wikipedia zero initiatives), there would be no reason for us to not host OER4Schools e.g. on wikibooks. However, wikibooks doesn't have those features (and we heavily rely on the semantic extension anyway), and so we forked, and (at least in once case) modified the source code to get what we wanted. (There is an issue around branding as well of course, which means that institutions might initially do their own wiki, but I think to some extent that's fair. Our resource is CC licensed, and if somebody felt that it should be on wikibooks, then there's no obstacle to it!)
I feel that (through our proposal) the wiki movement would gain ground in formal (higher) education, particularly in the area of teacher education, if we could demonstrate how well it can work. However, if we try to engage more people in this kind of collaborative, wiki-based publishing, one of the first questions will be: What about page headers? What about better searching? What about section numbering? We know this already from running our project. In fact, we have put a faculty workshop on hold, until we have some of these issues resolved, because we feel that we won't get people on board.
We feel very strongly about the benefits of collaborative resource development, and we would really like to take this message out to other departments in the UK. Cambridge aside, according to independent league tables, we do have one of the leading PGCE programmes in the UK, and a wide network of partners and collaborators in the UK and elsewhere. We feel that if we could just resolve some of these issues [in a professional way], there's be a lot of scope of engaging others.
We have attempted to resolve some of these issues: I have tried to resolve some myself, and we've also had some external help, but it would be good to have more professional, scalable solutions, so that some of the developments can be aligned better with the direction in which mediawiki is evolving, and so that our outcomes can be mainstreamed.
You could of course say: Well, we just want to support the wikipedia use case, and that's of course fine. However, if you are interested in promoting the idea of professionally produced open wikibooks through mediawiki, to host a variety of educational content, in formal education and teacher education, both in the UK, as well as in an international development context, I would suggest that you have a lot to gain from our proposal.