User talk:Khairdean

 Hello and Welcome to Wikiversity Khairdean! You can contact us with questions at the colloquium or me personally when you need help. Please remember to sign and date your finished comments when participating in discussions. The signature icon above the edit window makes it simple. All users are expected to abide by our Privacy, Civility, and the Terms of Use policies while at Wikiversity.

To get started, you may


 * Take a guided tour and learn to edit.
 * Visit a (kind of) random project.
 * Browse Wikiversity, or visit a portal corresponding to your educational level: pre-school, primary, secondary, tertiary, non-formal education.
 * Find out about research activities on Wikiversity.
 * Explore Wikiversity with the links to your left.


 * Read an introduction for teachers and find out how to write an educational resource for Wikiversity.
 * Give feedback about your initial observations
 * Discuss Wikiversity issues or ask questions at the colloquium.
 * Chat with other Wikiversitans on #wikiversity-en.
 * Follow Wikiversity on twitter (http://twitter.com/Wikiversity) and identi.ca (http://identi.ca/group/wikiversity).

You do not need to be an educator to edit. You only need to be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage. See you around Wikiversity! --Ottava Rima (talk) 14:49, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Spreadsheets
Hi Asim! I noticed your edits on the Spreadsheets page. I moved your content up and changed the IC3 link to a See Also. Please feel free to develop the Spreadsheets page as you envision it. -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 14:50, 23 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Nice one, thanks. I hope to add some structured lesson plans at some point soon. Khairdean (discuss • contribs) 15:09, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

ite sir ahahahhahhahahhahahhahhahaha

School:Information technology Edits
I noticed a lot of activity on and under School:Information technology. Are you working with students on this, or fighting vandalism? If you need assistance blocking vandals, just let us know at Request custodian action, or drop a quick note on my talk page. Thanks! -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 15:15, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks - it's students! Charming lot, aren't they? Khairdean (discuss • contribs) 09:30, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Response to vandalism
See WV:RCA

You attempted to continue adding material to a page in the middle of a vandalism spree. That complicates review.

With, you accepted signups in poor form, including IP signup, which IP was also being used for vandalism. I reverted to your last version, though it's a mess.

I understand you are dealing with teenagers. However, I'm proposing zero tolerance for blatant vandalism, i.e., immediate response, indef block with talk page access left open, so the user can request unblock, and for unblock, we'd want to see a commitment to cooperative participation from the user. There was one user who used "impolite language" in his own user sandbox. That's not good, but I'd let that go. We are committed to free education, here, free in many ways, but vandalism is disruptive and distracting. Please communicate with your students.

We can handle the problem of many registrations from a given IP hitting flood limits. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:30, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

So the IP was blocked, as before. This is predictable, obviously. Inviting a herd of unruly teenagers to the wiki is going to lead to disruption unless precautions are taken. The disruption leads to loss of access, students cannot register accounts. Because it only takes one disruptive user to lead to this, normal social measures may fail. The IP is currently blocked on Wikipedia, and has been blocked many times.. It has been blocked on meta.. I'm getting ideas, but what do you think? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:47, 2 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Hi, thanks for your work on this. I think its a general problem for schools. While most students use Wikis to copy and paste etc, there is little engagement because we often have our IPs blocked because of vandalism. I would point out though that its not persistent vandalism or if it is, it is localised to a very small number of pages - or to a short period of time (usually the hour of a single lesson). Of course I understand that this is a nuisance for admins, but I do think its a very valuable learning experience for young students to be shown how Wikis work. As a teacher I do of course monitor and maintain some degree of control over the students (!) but I am wary of being overly strict because I think their curiosity and experimentation is valuable for their learning. Naturally they will push the limits and explore the boundaries. I'm very open to ideas about what precautions could be taken etc. Students reading this are also welcome to comment... in a respectful manner! Khairdean (discuss • contribs) 16:57, 2 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm very involved with alternative education, I have a child who uses North Star. I'm suspecting that the high rate of vandalism could be related to your school being part of a compulsory education system. We can't do anything about that, but it's obvious: if you give an assignment to all the students, and they are not prepared and engaged in positive collaboration, if positive contribution is not exciting for them, they will create their own idea of fun. And poking the teacher would be a piece of that, if they think they won't get caught.


 * So a security question: are they logged in to the school system in order to gain internet access? Is there a record accessible to system administrators for when they use the system? The School IP gets blocked and stays blocked because there is no response from the school end. If there is no security at the school end, the School IP will be blocked, totally predictable.


 * Now, there are "issues" in investigating the access. There is another way to engage a different kind of security.


 * Accounts could be created for usage by students. These accounts could be created by any user, but, in this case, it would be a known and trusted user. You could do this. This would be the procedure.


 * You would create a series of accounts with names like KhairdeanStudent123. You have a password for all these accounts. When a student wants to participate in a project on Wikiversity, you change the password and provide the student with the new password and you note on-wiki, that the account has been turned over to them; they are instructed to change the password and share it with nobody, and you verify that the password has been changed and you note that, on-wiki. (Whether or not you reveal their name on-wiki is another issue. Obviously, to reveal the name requires their permission.) This process will bypass the IP block. (If you have any difficulty with this, it can be resolved).


 * You now know the real-life identity of all your students participating in the project. They are now responsible for what they do.


 * This is *also* how wikis work. We are all learning the possibilities of this medium. Wikiversity is exploring the free end, Wikipedia got rather stuck in a highly inefficient model that requires constant maintenance.


 * Lesson: Freedom = Responsibility.


 * I want to emphasize that I have no idea that the students are "Bad." They are behaving like fairly normal teenagers when they are in a low-responsibility situation. "Strict" can mean clear, assertive, and fully responsible, and expecting responsibility. And it can mean blaming, harsh, punitive, demanding, and generally being the kind of person that a healthy teenager would love to push off a cliff, so to speak. At least to upset.


 * It's fairly likely from the activity we saw today that the vandalism was culturally acceptable to more than one kid. They were having fun with each other, showing off, etc. Are they aware that this kind of fun makes it impossible for others to access Wikiversity? There are some who won't care, but they are fewer. In a free learning environment, where nobody is being forced to sit around in a boring place, nobody is forced to do what they don't choose to do, there would be less of this. But that's a larger issue, we won't solve today....


 * In any case, I'm proposing that the vandalism-only accounts be blocked. It's a simple consequence, easily undoable. What I'd want is for them to know, beforehand, that this is what happens on Wikiversity. We don't do the Wikipedia thing of three warnings, we often don't warn at all. After all, they know that "poop" is not the appropriate content for a page, or whatever. Isolated vandalism, we essentially do nothing but revert it. But revert warring, as happened extensively today, causes substantial resources to be devoted to handling the issue. Hence, zero tolerance, repeated vandalism = indef block, unless an account has a positive history established and we can then suspect the little brother got on. We'll still block! Our goal is free education, and we do expect people to be able to learn, and we have "rehabilitated" vandals. There was not, in fact, anything wrong with them, they were merely young.


 * My guess is that the topic assigned to them is b o r i n g, for them. Hence the account ICTSucks. Okay, sucks. Now what?


 * To my daughter, certain topics suck. She'd not remotely interested in them. The State of Massachusetts says that she *must* be educated in some of those subjects, but, fortunately, they don't say exactly when. Legally, she's "home schooled," and we have an educational plan filed with the local Superintendent of Schools, to satisfy the compulsory education laws, that provides opportunities for her to learn anything she wants. What she is interested in, she basically devours, she eats it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She's 13 and what is she most interested in?


 * Make-up, how to make it, buy it, use it, design faces with it. She's getting a lot of materials science along the way, some chemistry, she knows the make-up market, budgets herself -- she has not, in a year of being responsible for her own financial decisions, including food, clothing, education, everything, ever run out of money. Many adults can't do that! She compounds make-up from basic inexpensive materials (lipstick of any color she wants, for example, using non-toxic crayons), she's learning all the tricks, including the math involved, and she's becoming a real expert at application, the art of it. Now, how important is this, is she going to get into college with her make-up skills? Actually, she might. She is learning how to present herself, how to create the image she wants, and getting into a good college can involve that kind of skill, dealing with admissions officials. More to the point, it's her *life*. Is it important to a young woman how she looks? Is the Pope Catholic?


 * Essentially, she can read, extremely well, testing has shown that. So she can learn whatever she wants. She has more than four years before she has to worry about college admissions. She might or might not go to public high school, she talks about the choice. She just told me that she has asked for a science tutor at North Star. Her interests are broadening. Her "career goal" is to be a vlogger, she watches youtube constantly. She'll be spectacular at it, she is engaging, funny, and beautiful on top. So .... academics. Nothing wrong with academics, but our limited concepts of academics are just that: limited. "Learning by doing" is a major part of why I love Wikiversity.


 * Good luck with your students, it can be a challenging age, requiring high self-knowledge to handle. Otherwise they will drive you crazy. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 18:14, 2 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks Abd - plenty to think about even if I don't agree with you on all of it, thanks for the attention! Your experience with home schooling sounds amazing. All the best with it! You're right in that we are in a state school and therefore have curriculum constraints. I will look at some of the suggestions for registering accounts. Cheers Khairdean (discuss • contribs) 13:05, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
 * User:Kong656, blocked because of the vandalism, may have now registered as User:Kong657. The blocks, if I'm correct, allow editing the user talk page. Please let your students know that if they are blocked, registering a new account is violating policy also; the way to recover is given in the block notice, see User talk:Kong656. To be explicit, if they were to, logged in, write

Sorry, won't do it again. --~
 * And save it, I'm sure they'd be unblocked. Once. If they do it again, that account and anything that looks like that account will be toast. If they have any problems doing this, please help them or ask me or Dave for help. Thanks. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 16:25, 6 October 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia Courses extension
See Courses for list of courses. Also see the Education programme.Leutha (discuss • contribs) 08:44, 12 October 2014 (UTC)

Organizing resources
You have created:
 * Sierra Leone-Cambridge

which is a fine resource. It should be organized under a more general learning project, together with other school collaboration projects as they are created. School collaboration? What do you think? --Abd (discuss • contribs) 15:06, 1 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Also, due to CC-BY-SA licensing restrictions, we can't just take content from one page and add it to a new page, deleting the original. To maintain the SA part of CC-BY-SA, we need to maintain the edit history of the previous page on the new page.  i have now merged those histories.  In the future, please move pages rather than creating new and deleting old.  Thanks!  -- Dave Braunschweig (discuss • contribs) 02:53, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Dave, I missed that there was history underneath that redir. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 21:18, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback. Firstly yes apologies I will move pages not just copy n paste them over. Thanks. As for a School collaboration page. Excellent idea. I would love to help create a better way in which school collaborations can take place using wikis.... I am a little confused however with the projects, Portals, Topics, Schools, Departments etc and the way Wikiversity is organised ... which i think is not very clear. I will look at the tours and FAQs when I have time because yes this stuff should be organised better in order to facilitate collaboration and make it easy to find things... but I am not sure how it is done now or how it could be done better tbh... all ideas or guidance welcome. Thanks again. Khairdean (discuss • contribs) 16:13, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
 * "Not very clear" is an understatement. Wikiversity is a "wiki," which is a synonym for "rapidly exploding mess" when started with an unclear vision (or the vision isn't maintained). However, we are learning to organize mainspace. There may be other school collaborations lurking in the maze, but I'll create the overall resource and move your page under it with some kind of boilerplate. Good luck with the tours and FAQs. If you figure anything out, let me know! (Different people have had different ideas at various times, and mostly Wikiversity never had the patience to settle on something clear and coherent and easy to understand. It's up to us....) --Abd (discuss • contribs) 20:33, 2 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Okay, I created a stub for the top-level page, and moved the resource under it. I also moved the individual school pages created, those linked, to underneath the resource. I think we would rather not have a collection of school stubs. However, school resources may be created later if there is a need. A good example for such a need is a top level resource, which is really just a carrier for work underneath. University of North Carolina. The real extant project is University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill/Tour Heels, which is about the University and the town of Chapel Hill, a UNC Chapel Hill student project. I hadn't looked at it for a while, after helping get it organized a bit. It's become a fantastic resource, a very good example of what wikis are good for. As they say at the top, impossible for Wikipedia. The name is a pun on tar heels.


 * I also cleaned up the redirects, fixing the double redir created and requesting deletion of the unnecessary ones. Thanks for your work, I look forward to seeing this project develop.


 * Wikiversity Rule Number One: If it's fun, do it! (Just be nice! and be careful about really large messes. Small ones we can handle.) --Abd (discuss • contribs) 21:18, 2 May 2015 (UTC)