Wikiversity:Education

This page gives a summary of various education topics as they relate to Wikiversity.

Nature of Education
Education is the development of individuals' capacity to realize various cultural goods and become a successful member of a society. Formally it encompasses teaching and learning specific knowledge, beliefs, and skills. Informally, it is the process of embibing ways of living and knowledge that are taught by parents and other members of the student's culture.
 * Inquiry and discovery
 * Collaboration and dialog
 * Online learning
 * Training

Levels of Education

 * Preschool through high school
 * Technical and Further Education (Training)
 * Undergraduate
 * Graduate
 * Continuing education

Wiki Pedagogy

 * Learning projects.
 * Learning to learn a wiki way - how best to use wiki technology in education
 * There exists a paper on One Laptop Per Teacher (OLPT), where the research question is "How can One Laptop Per Child be used as One Laptop Per Teacher?"
 * A paper on a constructivism approach called PedaGlue is being drafted.
 * Dialogical and critical learning

Education Communities
Communities of practice is a short introduction to the ideas of Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. They proposed that learning is social and comes largely from our experience of participating in daily life. Their model of situated learning proposed that learning involved a process of engagement in 'communities of practice'.

Education Research

 * Evaluation
 * Participation and co-learning
 * Action research

Experts or Expertise?
Wikis are collaborative spaces, and therefore require the contribution of many different types of people, from various backgrounds. Some people will be more knowledgeable than others in certain areas - these people might be viewed (or view themselves) as "experts". Alternatively, they might be said to have expertise, i.e., specific knowledge about something, rather than conform to the notion of what an "expert" is. Without necessarily challenging the notion of "expertness", it is possible to develop a wider conception that includes a process of developing expertise, rather than holding the status of "expert" as something fixed and far-ranging. It is true that experts have particular skill at seeing patterns and forming mental models (Bransford et al., 1999), but consider also the following statement about how we view the subject, and how this could inform a broader picture of "expertness":


 * "People's mental models of what it means to be an expert can affect the degree to which they learn throughout their lifetimes. A model that assumes that experts know all the answers is very different from a model of the accomplished novice, who is proud of his or her achievements and yet also realizes that there is much more to learn." (Bransford et al., 1999)