The site says it’s in beta, but no matter: everything’s beta nowadays, so the word’s meaning is obviously shifting. I’m starting to think that beta is the only condition for a wiki … but I digress.

Wikiversity is up. Here’s the welcome statement:

Wikiversity is a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Wikiversity is a multidimensional social organization dedicated to learning, teaching, research and service. Its primary goals are to:

* Create and host free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups in all languages
* Develop collaborative learning projects and communities around these materials

Learners and teachers are invited to join the Wikiversity community as editors of this wiki website where anyone can edit the pages. The community portal lists information about many aspects of Wikiversity.

Fascinating. Where will this initiative sit alongside the myriad other online learning initiatives? Will it co-opt them, take notice of them, co-exist with them, ignore them, re-invent them?

Wikiversity begins its work with two main categories: learning projects and learning groups. Here’s how they stand:

Learning projects involve the creation and development of Wikiversity pages that describe and facilitate the learning experiences of learning group members. Learning projects provide activities for learners.

At Wikiversity learning is by doing. Often this involves editing webpages and creating Wikiversity content. Sometimes this involves reading or engaging in activities in the world and writing about those.

A basic unit of community within Wikiversity is the Learning Group. Wikiversity learning groups are groups of Wikiversity participants with a shared learning goal. Learning Groups participate in Wikiversity Learning Projects that are relevant to achieving a group’s learning goals.

Someone’s obviously been reading up on how people learn. What’s interesting to me is how the doing is tied so closing to the reflecting and describing and the writing about. How rich can these projects be when there’s no face-to-face component, at least none that’s required? An interesting question, especially for anyone involved in e-learning.

The really dense reading right now, however, is on the Management page. I’ve had time only to skim it, but it looks like a cross between a worldwide faculty meeting, a PTA, and a university strategic planning session. Given that Wikiversity is guided by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’s mission to “to help make all free human knowledge available to all humanity,” I’m not surprised. My 64K question (and who would ever need more than 64K, or was that 640K?) is whether Wikiversity can do for teaching and learning what Wikipedia did for, or to, encyclopedias. Yes, time will tell, but something tells me that Wikiversity is even more ambitious than Wikipedia.

This is going to be very interesting.

UPDATE: I don’t know why I’ve never seen this page before–I’m certain there’s an analogous page on Wikipedia–but I must say that I admire the sentiment, at least in this context. Greatly. Be bold, not radical, and be bold in a context of civility. A fascinating set of socializing norms, and an interesting paradox. Boldness and civility are personal, that is, they are embraced and exemplified in human agency, one person at a time. Yet the goal is selfless collaboration. Much to think on here.