21.1 Educational development at otago polytechnic  (Page 9/13)

2. leigh blackall - november 29th, 2007 at 5:01 pm

Hi Wayne, thanks for the quick response and great news about the clarification on the copyright.

Regarding the FTEs4WikiEducator.. if such a thing was to become a reality, clearly it would have significant impacts on the development of free to reuse content and maybe even on professional networking and the like.. my first feeling was that such an effort may be too early (in NZ at least) as I don’t get a sense that other institutions are aware of wiki development models and the like, and so may not give the proposal the due consideration. But in saying that, I am very impatient for more progress in terms of cross institutional collaboration and commitment to the development of OER.

Perhaps if we could have a range of highly presentable resources first. There are quite a few the the Commonwealth of Learning have funded, but more would be good. This would help those who are still in that “producer consumer” way of thinking to recognise worth in the wiki that will attract them to look deeper. And after looking deeper, we can expect they will develop more sympathy for the “work in progress” model and the very text and image format that is prevalent across the wiki. In my experience here at the Poly, the most difficult thing has been to get people to look beyond the ‘text heavy’ look and feel of the resources, and to recognise the networking, and development efficiencies that can lead to the high production qualities that many are looking for.

Also, I think the Wikied could do more to placate the common worries of people who question the use of external services. Wikied has done well in trying to bridge the copyright divides.. but we need some sort of guarantee of service. So far, in the 12 months I have been using Wikied I have experienced only one short (a few hours) period of no access.. that was early on and since then it has had no issue. Something that guarantees service, outlines types of support, and some work in how to store data locally as well as on Wikied’s international servers would be helpful.. local and offshore storage would go someway towards ideas for other concerns relating to over centralisation and putting all eggs in one basket.

What would we do differently? I’m not sure, I think it is still too early to say. One thing we need is better communication between our separate areas. Don’t we all!! The problem of silos are certainly not as huge here at the Poly compared to some of the bigger institutions I have worked at, and I don’t really have many ideas on how to bridge these problems accept to encourage more open communication and less invite only face to face meetings.. for this though, a fair bit of skills development would be needed - and this relates to the communication disconnect I mention in the article.

3. wayne mackintosh - november 29th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

Hi Leigh, Solid well founded advice as always. Quality is equally important for both open and closed models of production. However, its typically a harder sell when using peer-production models. We’ve started some work on the Learning Design processes and QA procedures in WikiEducator and it seems to me that we should encourage international participation in refining these processes.