5.1 Wikieducator: memoirs, myths, misrepresentations and the magic  (Page 11/21)

I take your point about wikis in themselves being about self-organising communities. MySpace is also self-organising within the bounds of the software application it is built on. A wiki is built on wiki technologies and I still think there’s a way to go here with many variants on wikitext - there’s no commonly accepted standard wikitext language - grammar, structure, features, keywords and so on are dependent on the particular wiki software used and is a language that users have to adapt to. Transformations (e.g. to clean XHTML) are not yet straight forward with many wiki technologies. I’m sure this will all happen and is not far away. Wikis are indeed a very exciting part of the landscape. RSS is also an underutilised technology in educational contexts.

Cheers

6. wayne mackintosh - april 5th, 2007 at 7:43 pm

Hey Richard, Working on a Saturday - I hope that they’re paying you overtime :-) .

I think you’re right. The smart implementation of XML technologies is going to be the future in education. I’m borrowing a citation from Hewletts OER report on page 66, namely the “[k]ey to making the whole more than the sum of the parts is to create some XML” which you can download here. This pluggable technology is very exiting.

My concerns are social ones. Pluggable implies that you must plug the technology in somewhere. So the next questions are: - Where do I plug this in? Do I need permission to plug something in? What if I don’t like the socket where I’m expected to plug the technology in?

I also think, particularly when focusing on the developing world we are going to see resurgence of client side technologies that have smart ways of linking with server-based technologies through XML. Its going to be interesting to see how this all pans out in the near future.

You’re absolutely right that RSS/RDF etc is a grossly underutilised technology in education.

I’m on about the freedom of the teacher to teach -

How many IT policies in teaching organisations restrict downloads of software without some form of external control?

How many teaching organisations lock down desktops?

So it is conceivable in this pluggable environment that the freedoms of educators are restricted to the plugins they can use. “You can use any plugin as long as it fits our socket!” . This would be a tragedy for academic autonomy and the free cultural works movement.

I think that we are facing a new set of challenges - the guise that a free software installation on campus is a manifestation of the organisational commitment to freedom. For example, lets say I plan this big OER project and I embed my resources in Moodle. There is a considerable effort and cost required to reconfigure those resources for another environment. How do we facilitate mass-collaboration using the principles of self organisation in a LMS environment. LMSs were not designed for collaborative authoring. The were designed for teaching. Wiki’s were designed for collaborative authoring and are the most mature technologies to achieve this aim. Sure there are challenges associated with a standard wiki text - but I don’t know of any LMS that uses a standard authoring syntax. Try and take a course developed in Blackboard and port this to Moodle - you’ll see what I mean. The two LMSs have their own pedagogical structure - so it doesn’t matter how effective SCORM/IMS packaging is - there is a pedagogical mismatch.