Thanks Janet,
On 07/30/2014 12:47 PM, Janet Swisher
wrote:
Sounds cool, Patrick.
I think you're spot on that contributing to a wiki is a great way
to experience the collaborative nature of open source, without
needing a lot of coding skills. When you say that you would manage
the "committer" role, do you mean that you would be the gatekeeper
to getting changes into the "real" wiki?
Well I think there is a practical and academic purpose for this. On
the practical side, I'd want to make sure the wiki was not bombarded
with contributions that may require more management than the wiki
community can support. In addition, I want to understand (for
assessment purposes), and help the class discover
(team/project-based learning), the various motivations and
activities that drive collaboration, peer-production and
co-creation. In reality, there is nothing to stop anyone or all of
the students to joining up on their own. But as this is a course
with specific learning objectives, I'd like to be able to monitor
and evaluate their work.
I
guess that's a reasonable approximation of how open source code
projects work, even if it's not very wiki-ish.
Agreed, but this effort has a broader context.
Do
you have projects in mind for them to work on on TOSW?
Part of the curriculum will cover self-organization (self-organizing
groups who come together around affinity interests, who then self
organize themselves into specific roles and self-direct to choose
what they want to do). That's a long way of simply saying they will
be able to identify their own projects/topics to participate in.
Do you know about the School of Open at P2PU? http://schoolofopen.p2pu.org/
There may be resources there that would be useful to you.
Thank you very much I will check that out. I see you are with
Mozilla. I've been following along with the Webmaker activities to
pull ideas from.