Wikiworld - Commons and Education/Wikilearning

Wikilearning

Public EtherPad document to write Wikilearning manifesto.

Individual learning

• Alienated forms (such as school learning in a standard classroom)
• Emancipatory forms (such as self education, self teaching, autodidacticism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodidacticism)

Learning with others

• Paulo Freire's contribution
• Collaborative learning etc.
• Sugata Mitra's experiment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk60sYrU2RU

Learning for others

• Wikilearning
  • Contributing, collaborating and sharing
  • Amateur learning http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur

"A working definition of wikilearning could be as follows:

1) the group is self-organized and volunteer (in opposition to pupils and students as captive audience in the school settings); this naturally includes the option of starting new groups (so-called 'forking'),

2) all (study) materials are available on the basis of open access (content is created under copy left licenses, if licenses are needed at all) and

3) everybody has equal possibility for contributing, commenting and working on the materials right from the start.

An additional condition could be 4) to limit wikilearning to activities that are mediated by computer networks (in practice, the Internet), but that seems an unnecessary move, as the point of wikilearning is also to disseminate the practices out of the cyberworld into other spheres of life.

Wikilearning can also be defined using a pedagogical maxim launched by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière (1991): "Teach what you don't know." The maxim represents the ultimate equality between students and teachers, between people, as it does not take into account any distinctions like age, previous schooling history, or gender that are often taken as a basis of pedagogical rank. Thus wikilearning in its ideal form and full fruition but also in its many practices signifies radical equality between different people, and differs drastically from the politically regulated and curriculum directed schooling systems governed by the state." (See http://suoranta.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/wikilearning-as-radical-equality.pdf)

Table 1: http://suoranta.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/wikilearning-as-radical-equality.pdf