User:Countrymike/Notes on Reading groups

This page is for me to take notes on the development of Reading groups in Wikiversity.

I have started two reading groups so far in Wikiversity:


 * Eric Von Hippel:Democratizing Innovation
 * Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society - a Reading Group on Wikiversity

as well as working on Portal:Reading_groups.

I think that Reading groups are a great model of a learning project that works well in the Wikiversity environment.

Case Study Eric Von Hippel:Democratizing Innovation
Topic:Democratizing_innovation was started in the main namespace by User:Remi on February 2008 who also placed the template onto the page.

February 19th - I became aware of the page through Recent Changes and made a suggestion on the Talk page that this might make a good Reading group. At the time I was unaware that User:Remi had started the page; I know Remi as he is a fellow Custodian on Wikiversity. Remi emailed me using the Wikiversity Email user function to welcome my suggestion of creating a Reading group but apologizing for not having a lot of time to do so himself or participate much in the group.

February 20th - I made an interwiki link to Eric Von Hippel in Wikipedia. I had also been reading this suggestion by User:SB_Johnny about how projects in Wikiversity might be better structured around Topics and decided to rename the original page which was in the main namespace into Topic:Democratizing innovation. As per User:SB_Johnnys suggestions I also created Category:Democratizing innovation. This itself, in terms of how Wikiversity has stuggled with its internal organisation, reflects the uptake of an "innovation" suggested by User:SB_Johnny about 2 weeks earlier; I have also implemented this idea in Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society.

I created the Reading group Eric_Von_Hippel:Democratizing_Innovation, linked it from the Topic:Democratizing_innovation topic page and based the structure of the group somewhat on the Deschooling Society structure. I have listed each chapter and linked straight to the PDF file for that chapter and created discussion links straight to sections in the Talk page that reproduce the chapter headings.

I have linked the new group to Portal:Reading groups as well as Wikiversity_learning_model/Reading_group as sections of the book may have relevance to the development of Wikiversity.

I have added the template to the Wikipedia listing for the text here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratizing_Innovation.

This book appealed to me for such treatment because I see that it may be of relevance in helping to understand the development of large scale collaborative wikis and the development of Wikiversity. I have read the book already and while I may not have a lot of time to contribute content to the group, I was driven by a desire to establish the group in the chance that others over time may find it useful to have structure already in place to discuss the text. This was greatly assisted by the text being freely available in PDF format under a Creative Commons license.

February 21st: Blogged about this here: http://digitalsynapse.co.nz/2008/02/21/democratizing-innovation/ as well as added link to the reading group on my Del.icio.us bookmarks using the tags: wikiversity, portfolio-brentsimpson, and read.

March 23rd: First user, User:Leighblackall makes comment on the Introduction to the text.

Wikiworld
Started Wikiworld in response to pointer by Teemu on wikiversiy-l. Countrymike 21:59, 20 March 2008 (UTC)