User talk:Mpulier

 Hello Mpulier, and welcome to Wikiversity! If you need help, feel free to visit my talk page, or contact us and ask questions. After you leave a comment on a talk page, remember to sign and date; it helps everyone follow the threads of the discussion. The signature icon in the edit window makes it simple. To get started, you may


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And don't forget to explore Wikiversity with the links to your left. Be bold to contribute and to experiment with the sandbox or your userpage, and see you around Wikiversity! If you're a twitter user, please follow http://twitter.com/Wikiversity. --AFriedman (talk) 03:27, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

 Hello , we are the Baah and Bahh twins and we'd both like to welcome you to Wikiversity. While you sit back and explore Wikiversity, enjoy some of our fresh goat milk. You can help us learn by creating new learning resources or help us by improving the guided tours and other exploration tools. We look forward to seeing you around. Baaaahbye for now.

Hi!
Very exciting to see you on this wiki, given your Userpage description of yourself as an academic professional. Do you have any specific goals for developing or utilizing Wikiversity? --AFriedman (talk) 03:27, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your welcoming message, AFriedman. Despite my gratitude for your warmth and interest, and although the concept and potential of Wikiversity are intriguing, to be honest my immediate intention is parasitic: I'm simply seeking notions and methods to bring into the school that I am developing that will offer online training to professionals who wish to provide mental health services online ethically and competently.
 * I'm facing issues of adult learning theory, how to take advantage of what learning online has to offer and what it takes to overcome the disadvantages. I'm looking for how to plan and monitor our development. I want to know what goes into teaching to make it work.
 * For example, when it comes to the more concrete activity of creating, organizing and administering content of what we will be teaching, I'm considering conceptualizing the elements of content as being "Points" to be made/conveyed/acquired/retained/digested/accepted or rejected/integrated and adapted. (For example—this recalled from Walt Kelly's Pogo comic strip—"Poltergeists constitute the principal type of material manifestation." A Point like that might be included in a lesson about ghosts. Not that I'm into ghosts. I'm into Pogo.) Points can be collected into Topics. Topics can be chosen for inclusion in the Syllabus of a Course, with some of the relevant Points then being worked into Presentations (Classes, Lectures, Articles, Videos or some similar medium or format). A set of such Presentations is the foundation for a Course. Courses are to be arranged into Curricula. Hopefully, this both makes sense and will make things neat and manageable.
 * All this is pretty basic. I'm trying to lay a foundation since my colleagues and I are building the school from the ground up.
 * Eventually, perhaps, we will have a library of material that could be fashioned into Presentations for the general public and that we could contribute to Wikiversity. From a quick glance at the resources here I see that so many clever and knowledgeable people are bringing ideas, structures and methods in from the world of scientific and experience-based education as to make it unlikely that I will be able to add anything by way of "development"; but the special field of online education of health care professionals may be so sparsely explored that I might come across something of value, much as an amateur astronomer might sometimes discover a nova or comet.--Myron Pulier 04:44, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Best of luck with curriculum development. Thanks for the info, and thanks for your email. Are you developing the curriculum for UMDNJ? I live not too far from NJ. Also, is the program going to be all online or will some aspects of it be based in the classroom? Re: adult learning theory, you may want to go to the site called WikiEducator. That's another wiki very similar to Wikiversity, but more oriented toward teachers who are interested in developing online curricula. WikiEducator also offers a very nice online course that I took about a year ago called Learning4Content, which is about how to use the wiki markup language. I found out about WikiEducator from the page over here about Other Free Learning Resources. You may also want to look at the 100% online graduate degree program offered by Columbia University Engineering School, allowing people from anywhere in the world to get an engineering degree from Columbia. The graduate degree costs a lot of money, but there's plenty of information about the program on the site. In terms of presentation of information, I recently went to a seminar by Edward Tufte who is an expert in the field. I don't agree with everything he says, but it's interesting. --AFriedman (talk) 16:40, 3 January 2010 (UTC)