Portal:Mentorship
This portal is for organizing information and resources related to mentorship and learning how to mentor. The idea here is to create a home for mentorship on Wikiversity.
Mentorship
editWikiversity doesn't have teachers or professors as such, we have mentors. Anyone can be both a learner and a mentor. Learners are generally expected to add to and update resources while they are learning from them. As such the role of mentors is to merely guide learning.
Wikiversity is considering four main types of mentors:
Content Mentors assist participants in developing resources for Wikiversity. There are a number of tasks mentors can help with:
- Wiki Training: Train new participants in how to use a wiki environment and wiki syntax.
- Documentation: Develop and update resources that can be used to aid in mentoring new participants.
- Review: Review contributions, offer encouragement, and provide constructive feedback on their quality and content.
- Illustrate: Improve resources by creating or adding graphic content, pictures, sounds and video files to make learning more enjoyable, and present an image of quality education.
- Write: Make learning more enjoyable by contributing content to make Wikiversity more useful.
- Improve: Improve the quality of resources to meet respected educational standards.
- Watch: Watch out for vandalism, test edits, and the like, and encourage constructive editing.
An Education Mentor volunteers to oversee and guide learners in their education on Wikiversity. There are many tasks that mentors can help with:
- Write: Write material for courses and resources for subjects you know about and fill gaps in subject coverage.
- Design: Design assignments, tests or quizzes that learners can take to aid in judging their comprehension.
- Update: Keep courses and resources current — correct outdated facts and fix external links that have become broken.
- Research: Gather available sources of information related to courses and resources to help encourage further learning.
- Encourage: Encourage learners to pursue interests, educational goals and course work.
- Test: Test learners comprehension and abilities, and provide feedback to help learners pursue further goals.
- Tutor: Be available to help learners with questions and problems encountered while learning.
- Organize: Create and update pages for organizing content so there are more ways to find courses and resources.
- Find: Help find (more) people who can and are willing to mentor, and encourage learners to become mentors also.
- Fund: Help find people, organizations and companies willing to fund education and research.
A Scholarly mentor volunteers to oversee and guide publication according to verifiable standard. There are many tasks the mentor can help with:
See: Portal:Wiki Scholar
- Peer review: Determine the validity of the scholarly effort in current academia.
- Collaborate: Work in unison (or parallel) to accomplish a scholarly goal.
- Research: Explore the current resources available to underpin the study.
- Verify: Develop a system of observation to prove the study as the origin of these scholarly findings.
- Sharing: Delegate tasks to other parties to increase the study's scholarly standing.
- Criticism: Ensure the study has balanced observational tendencies.
- Plagiarism: Ensure the study has proper ethical declaration of all intellectual property.
- Confirm: Observe the findings.
- Cite/Reference: Find the best sources for the intellectual property mentioned or used.
- Copy Edit: Examine the study's scholarly readability.
- Edit: Restructure the presentation of the study to scholarly requirements.
- Contribute: Provide resources to improve the study's scholarly opportunities.
A Research Mentor helps and guides learners in their research goals. There are a few tasks that mentors can help with:
- Research: Find reliable websites and Articles that learners can use as a source for their research.
- Review: Review research methods used, data included, assumptions made, etc. and provide feedback.
- Recruit: Find expert Reviewers from outside the Wikiversity Community, to review research that is outside the experience of those within the community
- Question: Question everything as a way to inspire learners to improve their research.
Custodian Mentors: The founders of Wikiversity and its support staff mentor custodian candidates how to operate the Wikiversity site and keep it "tidy".