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EWTE: Difference between revisions
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= Objective = | = Objective = | ||
Mediawiki is already used to host Open Educational Resources (OER), such as Wikipedia (which is possibly the most widely used | Mediawiki is already used to host Open Educational Resources (OER), such as Wikipedia (which is possibly the most widely used open resource overall). However, the use of mediawiki to develop and host more complex resources, such as structured resources (such as textbooks), is still limited. In particular, Mediawiki could be a suitable platform for collaboratively producing and hosting teacher education resources, including open textbooks (whether these are teacher education resources or otherwise). However, our previous research on the [[ORBIT]] project has highlighted some of the obstacles to this, that we are trying to address through this project. The work undertaken as part of the [[EWTE]] project, aims to further develop our mediawiki practices and facilities to make it a more suitable platform for hosting ''structured'' open educational content. This could bring potentially very significant gains to the OER community, and possibly leads to a far greater adoption of mediawiki in this area. | ||
= Mediawiki and Open Educational Resources = | = Mediawiki and Open Educational Resources = | ||
OER are understood to have three freedoms (c.f. [http://www.sciencemedianetwork.org/Publications/Hassler_Mays_OpenContent]): Legal, technical, and education/participation. While many OER initiatives focus primarily on legal freedom, this project focusses on technical freedom (including access) and strategies for presenting content in educationally appropriate ways, allowing participation. | |||
''' | '''Technical freedom and Access.''' Mediawiki already is a strong platform in terms of providing multiple ways of accessing content, including facilities like an API, a version for mobile content, as well as the ability to download content as PDF or as a ZIM archive. However, many of these facilities are first "stress tested" on Wikipedia, and may be somewhat tailored to use on Wikipedia (and the kind of content hosted on Wikipedia, i.e. encyclopaedia articles). In this project, we seek to apply the the accessibility provided by mediawiki to another site (i.e. http://oer.educ.cam.ac.uk/wiki), and explore to what extent the tools developed for Wikipedia carry over to other mediawiki sites, particularly with regard to a mobile site, PDF and ZIM. | ||
'''Usability.''' Visual editor and TogetherJS. We were also keen to introduce some of the excellent usability enhancements. | |||
'''Educational freedom and content organisation.''' One of the areas where we previously experienced difficulties were in the area of content organisation. Wikipedia's "unit of content" are encyclopaedia articles. While these articles have relations with each other, articles do not form "linear sequences". Other other types of educational materials, such as books, have a linear order. Typically such content would be organised as a set of (reasonable length) pages, with appropriate navigation between pages. Other than doing this manually, by default, mediawiki does not provide such facilities. However, as part of this project, we developed a number of options to better structure content (see below), enabling mediawiki users to structure their content in ways more suitable for certain typed of educational content (books, manuals, courses, including professional development courses). The issues address here should be highly relevant for other sites that offer more structured content, such as [https://www.wikiversity.org Wikiversity] and [http://www.wikibooks.org Wikibooks]. | |||
The concrete goal of the project is to develop a number of extensions to mediawiki, that will significantly enhance the usability of the platform for creating teaching and learning materials in Higher Education, and particularly for teacher education. We expect the outcomes of this project to be immediately applicable to other wikimedia sites (including wikibooks). | The concrete goal of the project is to develop a number of extensions to mediawiki, that will significantly enhance the usability of the platform for creating teaching and learning materials in Higher Education, and particularly for teacher education. We expect the outcomes of this project to be immediately applicable to other wikimedia sites (including wikibooks). | ||
