Wikiversity:Colloquium/archives/March 2009

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Start a Wikiversity Project

I recently made some templates which others might find useful (to use as is, or to copy and adapt). If they are useful would it help to develop this learning resource? - Start a Wikiversity Project - and extend it with other approaches?

Well, the question is if we are on the end of methods of e-learning which can be applied on MediaWiki? Do you understand me?--Juan de Vojníkov 09:04, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Fonts

on the page, http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Russian

under Basics, line 2, Accents (?????'???)how do I get the text represented by the ? marks to display properly. note that I am able to see most of the cyrillic portions of the page but these ? mark appear throughout and make using these pages nearly impossible. There is no help page detailing how to set up the various fonts for the languages of the world.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.27.168.16 (talk • contribs) 09:35, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Heh, I think that the problem is, that someone ad there question marks directly. So it is not a bug.--Juan de Vojníkov 09:06, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I am trying to clean up Russian courses now, but it will take me some days. There are mixed courses so I have to restore all category:-(--Juan de Vojníkov 09:34, 5 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Russian History / Old Russian History ??

-- Where do I include? This is enormus field and I like pointers and feedback to what kind limitationes I impose if any.

I would like to start with the commonly reagarde orgin as is the Russian Primary Chronicle

I look forward to you points and as soon as possible pleas.

I have taken a deep intr in this for a lot of years, but my big handicap or obstacle is that I do not read or write Russian.

Yours Hans M G. hansg7@gmail.com Hans g 22:55, 8 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I dont think so, there are any limitations, if you will stay in the land of good behaviour you can use your fantasy to develope a really good educational resource. Well, history is not my favourite subject, but I will try to help you. (History of Russia). --Juan de Vojníkov 10:04, 9 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

how do you help newbies

20:22, 13 March 2009 (UTC)~--19:32, 13 March 2009 (UTC) I have not used Wikipedia before or Wikiversity.They have both proved interesting. I have quickly scanned help pages etc. but wonder on wikiversity how do find more about some things about the site itself:

(I guess I have committed the cardinal sins of creating multiple and inappropriate threads but am glad you have a tolerant policy and encourage input)

SYNTAX: the syntax eg -

are sub pages allowed to be nested as sub pages of sub pages,(I havent tried enough lessons to discover one with nested subpages ) - where do I find details of syntax and protocol re page source code, is it nearly all on wikipedia?

FORKING - you mention differences re productive forking etc but apparently assume anyone using wikiversity has previously used wikipedia (even edited it) clearly a de-facto situation originally but I am not sure the info is clear to a dumb newby like myself, perhaps you can reply with links to some usefull pages.
where do I ask such questions is the colloquium appropriate. (if not this will be a good example to others)
- here you can ask such questions.--Juan de Vojníkov 22:09, 13 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
PS Legacy Systems

ok I am starting to slowly find some further information re above topics . BUT as a further enquiry re optimisation for legacy systems: I use a low res CRT and I note you/WE (I should I guess consider myself part of the community)try to aid users with low spec/old/ancient/mobile devices; how does this page display on such systems, and if this page is ok, then what about other lessons / pages is anyone monitoring this eg for alternatives to images and ability to display in low resolution. Gandee 20:24, 13 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I dont think so, someone is monitoring this. But a good point. Maybe you can create somethink like user:Gandee/Notes, where you will write down problems you had here using older browser.--Juan de Vojníkov 22:09, 13 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The ultimate school

Below a modest constructive critique of the current school, which could be developed on this site :

- For orientation, every pupils would be able to watch short movies relating the everyday life of each profession, because a child can't professionally imagine it.

- In medicine courses, we should all know by heart saving gestures and the 12 recommended vaccines.

- Some psychology notions could make the young people more self-confident by themselves, and because teachers would avoid the Pygmalion effect.

- Every day we use nutrition, but we currently stay pendent of advertisements to choose our food. We should know how to establish a planning our daily needs, for instance in salt, iron, vitamins, antioxidants, or calories, and equally how to eliminate toxins and avoid poisonings of nutriments like cinnamon.

- In sport, we must learn a daily homework to practice with the involved muscles, and to don't work on the same 2 consecutive days. A vital thing in work is to pick up objects by bending the knees and never the back.

- For accommodation, every citizen needs the do-it-yourself (bases of electricity, plumbing, and masonry), with its tools names.

-In linguistic, the more important would be to learn the phonetic alphabet, because it's indispensable for other language learning. If we don't know the meanings of the foreign hymns, it can generate conflicts by misunderstood.

In English learning the term "defective" verb would give a new dimension tho conjugation (e.g.: to rain).

-In history, the week days origins could be interesting (e.g.: "Thursday" comes from the god "Thor", in Latin languages it's "Jupiter" like the Spanish "jueves" or the French "jeudi").

- In geography, we must provide an easy access to all summation lists (e.g.: countries rank by populations, densities, GDP, nuclear weapons, island per surface).

- In mathematics, let's show a graphic representation at the time of the multiplication arrays learning in order to visualize those quantities at least one time.

- In physical science, the hindsight necessary for universe understanding is easier by first learning the attractive 7 base units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit). We should also soon see the general waves scale, from the high frequencies of gamma rays, through the visible light, to low ones of radio waves.

- In astronomy, a single picture with the place of the sun on the galaxy, explaining its revolution period of 226 millions years around a galaxy traveling at 552 km/s could be useful.

- Finally, cerebral trainings role is still bad known whereas its potential is to my mind as important as sport for muscles (a few necessary examples for thinking to this new matter are available on my free site that I can provide by email). --JackPotte 06:08, 14 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Archiving Student Work

Hello!

I'm having some troubles figuring out a system of archive pages here at Wikiversity. I'm having students do fairly large group assignments inside my UserSpace, and I'm trying to figure out how to archive old assignments so future students can look over what previous classes accomplished. I'm not so familiar with the way this is done, and I've been progressing along a fairly "cavemannish" route of manually creating an archive page, then doing <cut> from the original page and <paste> into the archive page. This takes kind of a long time, and there are many opportunities for me to make the kind of mistakes to which I'm sadly prone. Also, this method doesn't transfer over the discussion pages.

So, in a nutshell, I'm wondering if there's a better way! Here's an example of the kind of thing I'm trying to archive.

Thank you very much! --Stevenarntson 20:04, 28 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Your current approach is the common approach used for archiving past discussions. You could use a more uniform structure to reduce the need to archive past assignment, like have students edit User:Stevenarntson/2009/Q1/Analytical_writing and User_talk:Stevenarntson/2009/Q1/Analytical_writing to begin with would keep assignments organized by year and quarter and would avoid the need to copy or move anything, assuming the same assignment never comes up twice in the same quarter. -- dark lama 16:51, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

We also have the ability to do automatic archiving, using a bot. Here's an example: {{auto archive|target='English Language Reference Desk/Archives/((Year))'|age=60|mincontributions=1}}. See English_Language_Reference_Desk. However, this does tend to make the watchlist less useful, since constant archiving obscures other changes. (You can hide bot edits on the watchlist, but I don't believe this will show an older non-bot edit.) If we could make the bot only run once a week or month, that would work better. StuRat 14:29, 1 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the ideas. I think I may try to implement something along the lines of Darklama's suggestion for now.

Stevenarntson 21:24, 1 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Scientology

It appears that Scientology has invaded our sacred halls via Origins of Scientology. It would seem that the dust up over at Wikipedia's ArbCom is causing scientologists to seek a new home. There seems little to the page except for propaganda to further that dispute with little discourse or any kind of learning. We should discuss if this is acceptable. I would suggest this page to be nominated for deletion. Ottava Rima (talk) 04:21, 20 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

--67.65.39.44 15:57, 20 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I dont see a problem at the moment.--Juan de Vojníkov 20:16, 9 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]