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EWTE: Difference between revisions
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This page describes the outcomes and objectives of a short project funded by the Wikimedia Foundation UK (during the second half of 2014), see https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Wiki-based_teacher_education_and_resource_development. | This page describes the outcomes and objectives of a short project funded by the Wikimedia Foundation UK (during the second half of 2014), see https://wikimedia.org.uk/wiki/Wiki-based_teacher_education_and_resource_development. | ||
== Summary == | |||
[http://www.mediawiki.org Mediawiki] is already used to host Open Educational Resources (OER), such as Wikipedia (which is possibly the most widely used open resource), which means that many people are familiar with both reading Wikipedia, as well as contributing (the barrier to which has been lowered significantly by the usability enhancements such as the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor visual editor]). Mediawiki has facilities for taking content offline, through [https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/OCG Offline Content Generation (OCG) toolchain], or [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid Parsoid] with [http://www.openzim.org ZIM] and [http://www.kiwix.org Kiwix]. | |||
These features mean that Mediawiki could be a good platform for hosting other types of OER, and a few years ago we started using Mediawiki to host the [[OER4Schools]] teacher professional development programme. As far as we are aware, it’s the only structured open teacher programme available aimed at teacher in sub-Saharan Africa (though of course there are other open teacher resources, from OER Africa, TESSA, COL, and others). | |||
While our mediawiki-based approach has been very successful in a number of ways, there have also been challenges. As an encyclopedia, the basic unit of Wikipedia is articles, which relate to each other, but often not in complex ways. TPD programmes need to be very clearly structured to be effective, and we thus built templates for structuring resources (with semantic properties), section numbers (with CSS), and navigation (again using semantic wiki). [http://www.wikimedia.org.uk Wikimedia UK] kindly provided some funding to help address some of these challenges, in collaboration with Emmanuel (of Kiwix) in a project to "Enable Wiki-based teacher education". There are of course some remaining challenges, and hope to continue working with the community in order to address these! | |||
= Objective = | = Objective = | ||
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'''Overarching outcomes.''' | '''Overarching outcomes.''' | ||
Through | Through this work, we gained some ground in the use of MediaWiki in formal Higher Education, particularly in the area of teacher education, and for the use of mediawiki to produce professional open wikibooks. We feel very strongly about the benefits of collaborative teacher resource development, and this project helped us to take this message out to the Faculty of Education (University of CambridgE) as well as other departments in the UK. | ||
'''Concrete outcomes.''' The concrete goal of the project | '''Concrete outcomes.''' The concrete goal of the project was to implement existing extensions, as well as to further develop a number of new extensions for 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 suggest that the outcomes of this project to be immediately applicable to other wikimedia sites (including wikibooks). | ||
The overall specific outcomes of this project are: | The overall specific outcomes of this project are: | ||
# Greater engagement of University of Cambridge staff and students with mediawiki, particularly within teacher education. This is measured through additional (University or Faculty) projects adopting our existing mediawiki site to host their resources (such as a teacher development programme for [http://www.raspberrypi.org Raspberry Pi]. | # Greater engagement of University of Cambridge staff and students with mediawiki, particularly within teacher education. This is measured through additional (University or Faculty) projects adopting our existing mediawiki site to host their resources (such as a teacher development programme for [http://www.raspberrypi.org Raspberry Pi]). | ||
# Greater engagement of UK and international Higher Education staff and students with mediawiki, measured through increased use of discussion on facebook | # Greater engagement of UK and international Higher Education staff and students with mediawiki, measured through increased use of discussion on facebook, see e.g. https://www.facebook.com/groups/oer4schools/. | ||
In accordance with the goals, the specific technical deliverables | In accordance with the goals, the specific technical deliverables were as follows: | ||
* '''Section numbers.''' A mediawiki extension that allows section numbers to be prefixed with strings, together with documentation. Implementation of this extension on our wiki. | * '''Section numbers.''' A mediawiki extension that allows section numbers to be prefixed with strings, together with documentation. Implementation of this extension on our wiki. | ||
* '''Project specific page banners.''' A mediawiki extension that the adding of project specific banners to wiki pages, in order to be able to mark a set of pages as belonging to the same project or set of pages. | * '''Project specific page banners.''' A mediawiki extension that the adding of project specific banners to wiki pages, in order to be able to mark a set of pages as belonging to the same project or set of pages. | ||
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== Collaborative options.== | == Collaborative options.== | ||
TogetherJS | The TogetherJS extension is now available on the wiki, and has been used on a few occasions to demonstrate the wiki remotely. The "Collaborative Editor" (which is planned), as a tool for real-time collaboration, was not ready for trialling. | ||
Collaborative editor was not trialled. | Collaborative editor was not trialled. | ||
