Managing the Platform: Higher Education and the Logic of Wikinomics (EDUCAUSE Review) |... - 0 views
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Wikipedia and other social networking sites provide a space or platform upon which all kinds of activities can flourish, with the idea of a platform transcending any particular technology or application and referring to either virtual or physical worlds. Collaboration among many users upon such a platform often produces unplanned and emergent
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the logic of commons-based peer production, and the logic of platform management transform the idea of the university and the very activities—teaching and learning, research, and publishing—that lie at the heart of this enterprise
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But at its heart, the university was born to provide a structure to govern the student-teacher relationship.
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development of Wikiversity (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page), an initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation
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materials are produced by Wikiversity participants, who are, like their counterparts in Wikipedia, motivated volunteers. In addition, the Wikiversity course materials, unlike those made available by MIT, are editable by users
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. Instead, students are invited to work together, to engage in discussion, to solve problems, and to otherwise “construct their knowledge.”
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transformed into a kind of platform where students were invited to explore/create/construct knowledge. Peer production is very much a part of the constructivist classroom setting.
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Put another way, the role of the teacher in a constructivist setting is like being a “procedural author,” as defined by Janet Murray when discussing virtual reality spaces.9
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are more theme-parks than sandboxes,” meaning that learning is made as uniform and as controlled as possible (under the name of “standardization” and “outcomes-based” assessments).
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In contrast, a sandbox conjures up images of unstructured, unplanned, emergent play that is determined by the players. Imagine a university organized and managed like a sandbox, where teachers and students are invited to play and create in an unstructured environment—or, rather, in an environment structured by their own actions, choices, and decisions.
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Concerns would surely be raised about the quality of these credentials, similar to the debates about the quality of the articles in Wikipedia
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To what degree will such informal learning and “credentialing by reputation” be legitimated and accepted by society?
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emerge from the decisions, the edits, the additions, and the deletions of a number of people, all bound by the rules and protocols of Wikipedia
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The wiki-ized university will probably not displace the traditional university but will likely exist alongside it, albeit in direct competition.