User talk:Aldenis

Here is what I think about the mission of wikiversity

Wikiversity is an open educational environment that facilitates the integration of learners, teachers, and community builders everywhere.

We learn by collaborating in the development of free instructional resources. Everyone already involved in any wikimedia project is learning all the time. We are all learning about specific topics, but also about the general nature of collaborative knowledge production within a highly dynamic community. Wikiversity focus on education makes it the best place to explore the larger implications of this model. Our instructional materials should explicitly benefit from the fact that they were born over a network, were raised in a virtual village, and can be used by everyone. This is a new way of doing curriculum development, and we all need to learn it.

We teach new ways of implementing the collective use of these resources. All wikimedia projects are based on an innovative model of open collaboration that results in the creation of rather conventional repositories of information. Our encyclopedias, dictionaries, databases, and archives are designed to replace and/or complement their closed, expensive, copyrighted, or plainly useless equivalent. Wikiversity is different. Producing great free content is only part of our mission. We want to deliver instructional resources in ways that promotes collaboration among users of these resources. A network of collective users would be the perfect counterpart of our network of collaborative producers.

We build a dynamic interface between virtual communities of free content creators and the pedagogical infrastructure of the physical world. Wikiversity is a hybrid network. We create instructional materials that make use of the wealth of resources generated by all wikimedia projects. We deliver these materials in ways that encourage their collective use. We promote further collaboration by designing educational assignments geared toward the development of all wikimedia projects. Our ultimate goal is to harness the power of existing learning communities, erasing the distinction between producers and consumers of free information worldwide. Deploying wikiversity resources in every brick-and-mortar classroom is one of the best ways to bring new contributors back to wikimedia. Aldenis 00:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

From Conventional Classrooms to Online Workshops

I posted this proposal a couple of weeks ago in a blog hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since then I have received some interesting feedback, and the idea is developing rather fast.

My name is Adrian Lopez Denis and I am a PhD candidate in Latin American history at UCLA. In the last two years I have been looking for ways to incorporate the open source model to collective forms of historical production. From the beginning, encouraging professional historians to contribute to the development of the wikipedia project emerged as the most obvious approach. Most professional historians are both researchers and educators. Besides conducting their own specialized studies, they are often expected to provide hundreds of undergraduate students with a relatively wider understanding of the past. Completing a history course usually requires writing research papers, journal entries, annotated bibliographies, or book reviews. Students are expected to produce a certain amount of pages that educators are supposed to read and grade. There is a great deal of redundancy and waste involved in this practice. Usually several students answer the same questions or write separately on the same topic, and the valuable time of the professionals that read these essays is wasted on a rather repetitive task.

In the process of essay writing, students use an array of resources, from the overpriced textbooks and readers they are expected to purchase to more readily available online tools like wikipedia. Some of us would perhaps push for deeper levels of inquiry involving books on reserve, open library searches, or even the occasional dive into local repositories of primary sources. In most cases, however, the entire process will be a mockery of actual research. As long as essay writing remains purely an academic exercise, or an evaluation tool, students would be learning a deep lesson in intellectual futility along with whatever other information the course itself is trying to convey. Assuming that each student is writing 10 pages for a given class, and each class has an average of 50 students, every course is in fact generating 500 pages of written material that would eventually find its way to the campus trashcans. In the meantime, the price of college textbooks is raising four times faster that the general inflation rate.

The solution to this conundrum is rather simple. Small teams of students should be the main producers of course material and every class should operate as a workshop for the collective assemblage of copyright-free instructional tools. Because each team would be working on a different problem, single copies of library materials placed on reserve could become the main source of raw information. Each assignment would generate a handful of multimedia modular units that could be used as building blocks to assemble larger teaching resources. Under this principle, each cohort of students would inherit some course material from their predecessors and contribute to it by adding new units or perfecting what is already there. Courses could evolve, expand, or even branch out. Although centered on the modular production of textbooks and anthologies, this concept could be extended to the creation of syllabi, handouts, slideshows, quizzes, webcasts, and much more. Educators would be involved in helping students to improve their writing rather than simply using the essays to gauge their individual performance. Students would be encouraged to collaborate rather than to compete, and could learn valuable lessons regarding the real nature and ultimate purpose of academic writing and scholarly research.

Online collaboration and electronic publishing of course materials would multiply the potential impact of this approach. Users outside the class, the country, or the continent could benefit from the work of the students. Course projects could be run on relatively closed websites associated to traditional scholarly institutions. The output from these sites could be periodically uploaded into larger repositories based on a more open model of intellectual collaboration along the lines of the wikipedia project. An even bolder move would be to base entire courses on the creation of actual wikipedia entries. Under this principle, the interaction between classmates and larger online communities could be immediate and continuous. Students could run a wikiportal, write a wikibook, or even be fully integrated in an electronic course within the wikiversity. Discussing the advantages, disadvantages, and larger implications of the wikimedia model of collective intellectual production could be a valuable educational experience in and on itself.

Changing our approach to in-class writing assignments could be rather significant. We could produce a huge repertoire of dynamically evolving instructional materials, created by students and for students, professionally edited and collectively reviewed, free and copylefted. It could be very difficult to convince many of our colleagues about the practicality of dumping the results of their promotion-giving, sabbatical-swallowing, and ultimately unwelcome original research into such an anarchic pool of information as wikipedia is today. It would be easier to alter our current approach to essay writing in the history class, recycling an otherwise dull operation into a socially productive and intellectually stimulating practice. Aldenis 00:10, 24 August 2006 (UTC)

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Wikiversity!

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Good luck! - Trevor MacInnis 00:24, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Logo

Hey Adrian,

Your idea is very good.

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Do you like?  Rei-artur  ?   20:15, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

Sugar in the times of cholera

Sugar in the times of cholera looks like a great project. I will try to think of ways to connect it constructively to the School of Medicine. --JWSchmidt 09:18, 27 September 2006 (UTC)

about your project

Hello Aldenis, I inform you that I just requested the set up of the Spanish domain for Wikiversity. We will see how long it takes until the domain gets ready. I don't really know what would be the best solution for the bilingual version of your project. I think you could connect the English and the Spanish projects with interwikis. But that wouldn't be a column bilingual system.

You thema you are going to work with is so specific that you may find people interested in participating on it on specialized forums. (Bueno, cambio al español ;OD) Si quieres que tu proyecto tenga éxito es fundamental que lo promociones tanto como puedas en todos los lugares que se te ocurran. Especialmente entre personas interesadas en ese área. Esto es especialmente relevante en áreas de estudio muy específicas.

Pero no te desanimes si a corto plazo no ves resultados. Las wikis, al principio, suelen crecer despacio. Ánimo y te deseo que tengas éxito con tu proyecto. --Javier Carro 09:56, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Igualmente :-). Este proyecto parece muy interesante. Cormaggio 10:27, 8 October 2006 (UTC) PS: (in English) you might want to see Topic:Graphic design for my question on how to create logos - your creativity and talents are easily apparent.

Invitation

Dear user of Wikiversity,

Do you like to join a reading club, where you can read and discuss literature? Reading clubs could have active and inactive participants. Active participants could be required to edit on a regularly basis untill a deadline is reached and another topic can be chosen for reading and discussing. Hopefully, reading clubs can ensure a social network on Wikiversity of people cooperating with eachother and becoming friends while discussing knowledge.--Daanschr 09:39, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Image copyright problems

Your currently affected uploads are listed below. Please provide a source and license template for each one. Thanks. – Mike.lifeguard | ^@en.wb 23:27, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

• 2006-08-24 00:16, Aldenis: AldenisLogoWikiversity1.png: untagged!; 0 (0)
• 2006-08-24 23:11, Aldenis: Wikiquestion.png: untagged!; 0 (0)
• 2006-09-07 07:46, Aldenis: Kite.png: untagged!; 1 (0)
• 2006-09-07 21:18, Aldenis: Openglobe.png: untagged!; 0 (0)
• 2006-09-07 21:24, Aldenis: Openwiki.png: untagged!; 0 (0)
• 2006-09-27 06:33, Aldenis: Guamacaro.png: untagged!; 0 (0)

Copyright problem with Image:Guamacaro.png

	Thanks for uploading Image:Guamacaro.png, but:
		This file may soon be deleted, unless some copyright information on the file can be determined. The Wikimedia Foundation is very careful about what files are included because of copyright law (see Wikiversity's Copyright policy).
		Wikiversity accepts three types of copyrighted works, open content, public domain, and fair use. Please signify what type of copyright the file uses by placing a copyright template on the file page like this: {{TemplateName}}
		Wikiversity requires that the work's copyright holder be acknowledged. The copyright holder is usually the work's creator, the creator's employer, or the last person who was transferred ownership rights. Please include this information by placing {{information}} on the file page and filling it out.
		Please signify the copyright information for any other files you have uploaded or will upload. Remember that files without this important information or with incorrect information can be deleted by a custodian.
		If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page or the Wikiversity community at the Colloquium. Thank you.

Crochet.david 10:51, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

file checking

Thanks for the copyright resolution. But, as indicate at the point 4 : do not forget to check all your over upload (use the my contributions tool in the top right screen with file as namespace.Crochet.david 18:07, 18 August 2009 (UTC)