Help:Resource types
From Wikiversity
What kind of educational resources can you create on Wikiversity? |
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[edit] Introduction
What kind of things are there on Wikiversity? We can start by looking briefly at other projects - both Wikimedia sister projects and the wider world of open educational resources.
[edit] Resource types on other Wikimedia projects
- Wikipedia does encyclopedia articles.
- Wikinews does news articles.
- Wikibooks does textbooks.
- Wikisource does literature and primary sources.
- Wiktionary does dictionary entries.
All these Wikimedia projects have pretty well only ONE kind of resource type each. More than that, for the most part there's a pretty standard way of writing all these kinds of thing. Dictionary entries have a highly standardized format followed by most dictionaries for hundreds of years. Encyclopedia articles are also an ancient genre of writing. Journalists have developed their own styles, taught at schools of journalism.[1] Books vary more, but everyone knows what a chapter is.
[edit] Resource types in other OER initiatives
We could say that "Wikiversity does open educational resources". So what are open educational resources? All the main definitions and declarations relating to open educational resources emphasize the diversity of resource types. Unfortunately there is no complete list. This is probably because there never could be a complete list.
- Cape Town Declaration: "course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning".[2]
- Hewlett Packard report on OER (2007): "full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge."[3]
- iCommons.org: "...different types of resources, including learning content (courses, lesson plans and learning objects), tools (software that supports the development, management and re-use of content) and implementation resources (the intellectual property licences that promote open licensing and other principles of best practice)."[4]
See also: Classifying educational resources.
[edit] Resource types on Wikiversity
Wikiversity differs from its Wikimedia sister projects in that its resources are of multiple types and highly varied. Each resource type has its own "ideal" way of being written. This makes it much more difficult to write a guide to writing the ideal Wikiversity resource than writing a guide to the ideal Wikipedia article. Resource types at Wikiversity have grown from the grass-roots level - the community of contributors has decided what they are in an extremely ad hoc fashion. The box at the top of this page contains a list of all resource types currently known about on Wikiversity.
[edit] Conventional resource types
Most of the resource types on Wikiversity have pretty straightforward or established forms. Although Wikiversity never had any formal taxonomy of resource types during its first two years of independent existence (up to 2008), contributors nevertheless tended to create resources in conformity with existing conventional patterns.
The following list draws from the list of resource types above. It describes what Wikiversitarians have in fact created during the last few years. It does not lay down a set of restrictions on resource types, but it shows you the way to build on accumulated experience and it gives you a wide range of ideas from which to choose when constructing your own resources. Note in particular the sections further down this page on experimental and new resource types.
| Resource type | Comment | Essential links |
|---|---|---|
| Activities | Activities are a broad range of things which usually motivate a learner to do more than just edit the wiki. Wikiversity contributors have created (among other things): challenges, experiments, games, labs, learning activities, quizzes and simulations. Activities are normally included into larger projects such as courses and lessons, although there are also excellent resources which are simply collections of activities. Feel free to extend the range of activity types. | |
| Articles | Encyclopedia articles for the most part belong on Wikipedia. Articles pasted from Wikipedia into Wikiversity are generally deleted. However articles on educational topics are acceptable on Wikiversity, especially when they are more specialized than anything on Wikipedia, or might qualify as original research. For guidance on good article writing, see Wikipedia. An example: Open Educational Resources (originally written for Wikiversity, but might be copied back to Wikipedia). | |
| Courses | Courses at Wikiversity are generally organizational pages which collect together other resources, such as lectures, assignments, lessons, quizzes, reading lists and handouts. Courses are frequently associated with real world classes, but occasionally their intended audience will be new visitors to Wikiversity. Sometimes courses are re-run at intervals by their original creator (e.g. annually); sometimes they will be abandoned after first use, which makes it easier to re-purpose them for use with different classes and a new teacher. Please note that Wikiversity itself cannot offer credits - any credits must be offered by the real-world institution to which the course facilitator belongs. Generally you are recommended to use subpages for the resources which constitute the course. | |
| Lectures | Contributors to Wikiversity who come from real-world universities often structure their courses as sequences of lectures and assignments. The individual lecture pages may look similar to encyclopedia articles if taken out of context. It's a good idea to tag your lectures as lectures and link them back to the course/project page, so that they don't get mistaken for encyclopedia articles and deleted. Tip: create your lectures as subpages of the course/project page, because this will add an automatic link-back at the top of the page. | |
| Lessons | A lesson can be thought of as a methodologically (very much) more sophisticated version of a lecture. A good lesson is one of the most difficult types of educational resource to create. Lessons may typically display some of the following characteristics: segmentation to aid learning, sequencing by difficulty level, use of didactic styles of writing (e.g. simplification, repetition, redundancy), creating learning paths from known to unknown, attempts to involve an audience of learners, setting explicit learning goals, reflecting and catching the immediacy of a learning context. | |
| Lesson plans | While a lesson is targetted at learners, lesson plans are targetted at teachers. Lesson plans have well-established formats which teachers are trained to create. Wikiversity can be used to collate, redistribute and (collectively or individually) develop lesson plans. Teachers may then visit Wikiversity and take away lesson plans for using in their real world classes. | |
| Assignments | Assignments are homework tasks which have often been created as subpages of "courses". | |
| Events | Wikiversity is sometimes used for announcing educational events of national or international importance. If you tag your event as an event, it is more likely to be picked up by others. Conferences are a sub-category of events. | |
| Reading lists | Reading lists and bibliographies are very common on Wikiversity, and are usually included at the bottom of other resource pages. Occasionally contributors create a separate page for their reading lists. Tip: create your reading list as a subpage of the course/project page, because this will add an automatic link-back at the top of the page and help prevent your reading list from becoming disconnected from the other resources to which it belongs. | |
| Discussion | The discussion is a well-established form of creating content on wikis. Encyclopedia articles aside, discussions are the second largest "genre" of writing on Wikipedia. Discussions on wikis have simple threads and basic rules of behavior. The discussion is the simplest form of exchange of opinions. Discussions can develop or merge into other genres of opinion exchanges, such as blogs, forums, colloquia and symposia (all categorized as forms of discussion). | |
| Quizzes | A quiz (using the special quiz extension) is technically much more difficult to write, but the technology pretty well dictates what it looks like. See Help:Quiz. Writing a good quiz is more than just writing the first questions that come to your mind, however. Thousands of publications have been written on this topic alone, and you should let external resources guide you to writing good quizzes. Here are some places to start:
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| Papers / essays | An academic paper is another fairly standardized form which you can create on Wikiversity. If you are a postgraduate or post-doctoral academic, then you won't need any more guidance. For students at earlier stages of their studies, there are 1000's of publications which help you. Here are some places to start:
A paper or essay will typically have a closed set of original authors (maybe only one) and a point-of-view. Unlike neutral forms of expression, papers or essays should clearly attribute authorship and possible POV at the top (not just in the history), and offer feedback and discussion options at the bottom (not just on the talk page). An essay can be thought of as a derivative form of discussion, where an editor has more to say than can be fitted into a paragraph. In this sense, the essay is associated with the blog (a sub-category of essays and discussions). |
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| Reading groups | A reading group is a resource type that has grown of its own accord at Wikiversity. To set up a reading group:
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[edit] Specialised resource types
| Resource type | Comment |
|---|---|
| Observation clocks | For an example, see Bloom Clock (one of the earliest and largest resources on Wikiversity). An observation clock is a specialized use of the wiki to coordinate recording and identification procedures for observing natural cyclical phenomena. If you wish to create an observation clock, you should start by talking to the coordinators of an existing observation clock (e.g. User:SB_Johnny). |
[edit] Experimental resource types
| Resource type | Comment |
|---|---|
| Projects | "Project" is a good name to give your resource if you're not quite sure what it is. A project can be as conventional as a traditional "course" or as experimental as a "workshop", or anywhere between. A project may also be much larger or longer-term than a course, and may comprise many courses, workshops or sub-projects. It could be collaborative, but not necessarily. "Project" is the most open and vague designation you can apply to your resource. |
| Workshops | Workshops at Wikiversity have rarely been called such - they have gone under names such as "learning by doing", "learning projects" and others, or sometimes no name at all, and very few are categorized as workshops. However the experimental workshop, collaboratively exploring the potential of the Mediawiki software for educational purposes, was one of the core resource types around which Wikiversity was planned. The workshop is still in need of a recipe for success. Looking at some of those workshops which have been successful may help produce such a recipe. |
[edit] New resource types
You can get some ideas for new resources types by comparing with other educational initiatives at Classifying educational resources.
Note also: discussion on talk page.
[edit] Inventing resource types
At Wikiversity you are not limited to the existing canon of resource types. You can try creating and experimenting with a completely new resource type. The only restriction is that the resource type should be educational (and non-absurdly educational). If you wish to create a new resource type, it's good to have a category, a project box, a help page and some boilerplate for the resource type, so that others can find and learn about your new resource type. When creating a category, project box and help page, you may wish to ask the help of a custodian.
Custodians who can help with creating new resource types: User:McCormack.
[edit] Discovering resource types
A lot of the resource types on this page were "discovered" by hunting through Wikiversity to find out what real contributors had been quietly beavering away at for a couple of years. Hunting for new resource types isn't easy, because you have to second guess what other people might have been considering their contributions to be, and then you have to guess some typical keywords to search for which might betray the existence of such resource types. Unfortunately real contributors often don't leave behind clear resource type categories, even if their personal intentions are clear once you find their page. It is quite possible that there are more resource types out there on Wikiversity waiting to be discovered.
[edit] Organizational resource types
[edit] Organizational resource types without namespaces
These organizational resource types can be said to be the main entry points for one learning resource. Learning resources on Wikiversity, when developed, are often spread over many pages and need a page to coordinate the resource. When tagging a page as one of these resource types, please just tag the main entry page. The sub-pages of the course (project, etc) will normally be other resource types and would require different tags.
The main entry pages for courses, projects and workshops tend to have learning content when small or at earlier stages of development, and become largely organizational pages when more developed. The last pieces of "content" to remain in them, as they grow and expand across many subpages, are normally introductions and reading lists.
| Resource type | Comment | Essential links |
|---|---|---|
| Courses | See above. | |
| Projects | See above. | |
| Workshops | See above. |
[edit] Organizational resource types with their own namespaces
Some of the highest order organizational resource types are given their own namespaces. These resource types should not directly contain any learning content.
| Resource type | Comment | Essential links |
|---|---|---|
| Portals | Portals are the highest level of organization. See Wikiversity:Portal reform. | |
| Schools | The school is a subordinate level of organization to the portal. It used to reflect the organization of universities into "schools". Proposals to remove the namespace have met with substantial support but not consensus. There is no agreement on the purpose of the namespace. | |
| Topics | The topic is a level of organization which is perhaps smaller than that of the school and which has met with similar controversy. It is not clearly defined at the current time. There has been a successful tendency to use the topic namespace for the main organization of learning resources relating to specific languages (e.g. Topic:French coordinates all French language learning resources). |
[edit] Categorizing resource types
Resource types on this page have been categorized, rather arbitrarily, into: conventional, specialized, experimental and organizational (with intentional overlaps).
Possible further criteria for analyzing resource types:
- the extent to which the resource type favors, combines or requires individualistic or collective approaches to editing (e.g. a blog is highly individualistic, but often leads into a subsequent collective discussion).
- the way in which the resource type relates to the requirement for a neutral point of view - i.e. certain educational resource types, such as essays, blogs and articles, necessarily breach neutrality and need to be looked at as regards how this is controlled and declared.
[edit] References
- ↑ http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldclass//teachandlearn/journalism_lessonplan_2.shtml - A BBC learning resource on journalistic style
- ↑ Cape Town Declaration, http://www.capetowndeclaration.org/read-the-declaration (middle of 3rd para.)
- ↑ Atkins, D., Seely Brown, J., Hammond, A. (2007) A review of the the Open Educational Resources movement: achievements, challenges and new opportunities. http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-resources-oer-movement_final.pdf
- ↑ http://icommons.org/2007/03/01/virtual-learning-10-open-education-resources/#more-491
[edit] See also
- Help:Resources by type
- Classifying educational resources
- Wikiversity:Learning resources
- Developing Wikiversity through action research/List of uses of Wikiversity
- Wikiversity:Examples - started in 2006, this page lists examples of Wikiversity content, divided by type
Overviews: Resource types - How to write an educational resource - Project boxes for resource types
Organisational resources: Courses - Lessons - Reading groups - Projects - Workshops - Collections
Components / stand-alone resources: Lessons - Articles - Lesson plans - Discussions - Events - Essays - Lectures - Papers - Quizzes - Blogs - Media
Activities: Simulations - Games - Labs - Experiments - Challenges
Miscellaneous resources: Experimental resources
