Flexi wishes you a happy holiday season
December 14, 2007 at 3:13 am (Uncategorized)
Ok so the video for the weeds unit went really well!
I was also hoping to add some useful resources and activities which had been developed by a colleague working at the Cromwell campus but my request was met with hesitation and I left empty handed.There still seems to be reluctance , maybe even skeptisism about putting resources onto wikieducator. Perhaps my powers of persuasion are waning?Earlier in the week we had another meeting about where we were up to with the project and again we were asked to explain why wikieducator was being used as a library for storing useful resources and activities for horticulture units opposed to our in house system (blackboard ).The debate was lively and all points of view respected.
Pro wiki team came out swinging with expanded versions of the following which I have copied from the wiki main page
Benefits of using Wikieducator from the perspective of the Polytech include:
Free content hosting
Free and supported access to MediaWiki software
Exposure, promotion and networking with other educational organisations
Internationalisation and dialog with the Commonwealth of Learning
Collaborative development opportunities and resource sharing
Open access to learning resources
Staff development of MediaWiki editing skills that are transferable to more popular MediaWiki based projects like Wikipedia, as well as the Polyech’s own hosted MediaWiki.
Devil’ advocates argued that free content is a threat to the money earning potential in their region in that certain learning packages would not be paid for or participants would not enrol in a certain course if the information was freely available.Team Devil’ Advocate have a good feel for their industry and the region they work in and know that many growers would have the ability to apply the knowledge if they could get their paws on it and potential enrolments could suffer as a result.
What we decided to do was proceed with the units I have been working on as they were deemed fairly generic with a view of the Cromwell Campus blackboard whizz transferring resources and activities onto blackboard if needed.
They also took on-board Leigh’s suggestion that a few staff members should skillshare knowledge about Blackboard and Wiki in the event of the one person being trained up in more flexible delivery styles should leave the good ship polytech.
It was also agreed that regular meetings should take place starting in the New Year so that units or learning packages being developed for flexible delivery were weighed for their commercial sensitivity and perhaps abstracts or tasters of the information were on offer to a prospective learner with the complete package presented once the learner had enrolled.(Although I don’t know how this fits with wiki philosophy).
Some comments were made about the quality of the horticulture units we have been loading onto wiki specifically the use of jargon(demonstate knowledge of…..)so I will take this on board and continue to refine the resources and get rid of language that may put people off.No one really said they liked what we had done so far but at the same time it is not finished and in fact the nature of the wiki is that information is live, changing and expanding and like a garden,never finshed.
I have made queries about finishing off my diploma part time which I think is offered on blackboard so I would like to give it a try from a users/customers point of view.
Anyway that is my interpretation of how the meeting went.Leigh,do you think I nailed it?Anything to add or change?
OK so back to the nitty gritty…I am going to have more time to work on wiki now and the great news is that the collection curators at the Dunedin Botanic Garden seem keen to help with resources which has thrilled me to no end.Check out the following!In the meantime I will respond to some of the changes and refinements for the wiki.
Botanic nomenclature resources
Leigh,
Are all the vids for fruit tree pruning finished ?
Has Sunshine been able to creat the DVDs as discusssed and will they have pretty pictures on them and OP logo?
I now have youtube account (user name hortykimmy and password same as usual.)Will you load all blip onto youtube for me?
I have been given a power point for weeds, can I send to you to upload to slideshare?
Gotta go trim a tree..xmas tree that is!
Ovah and out.
leighblackall said,
December 14, 2007 at 10:03 am
Hey Hortykim, yep I reckon that’s how it went. Well captured. I reckon we should let the Wikieducator community know about this post so they can help consider these barriers to adoption. But more importantly we should focus on getting the vids into the wiki, getting activities in, and making the links between the course page and the activities so as to improve usability.
No DVD yet. I asked Sunshine to finish the Fruit Tree vids and that used her remaining hours. That said, it doesn’t take much to make a DVD so I’m sure she’ll go the xtra yards for ya. Chirstmas and all
I will copy vids over to your Youtube account, but it’d be good to show you how to do that too so when you load new movies you can have them load to both Blip and Youtube at the same time. In fact, I don’t reckon you’d need showing its so easy. I use http://heyspread.com check it out and see if you can work it.
As for Slideshare, you sure you can’t handle that too? I mean, I’ve seen you do it before. You did it for the presentation slides of your mates box garden project up at Christchurch… I can help though, next week I’ll focus a bit on the wiki and write up an update like I did for Tourism recently. Check it out.