Press room

What is the Wikiversity?

It is a website where anybody can start online courses. These courses may be self-study materials, but also learning cycles where you ask people to study certain texts and have a discussion about them. So, it is an online forum for people to get together to study and learn.

Can you give an example of how a particular course community could integrate the Wikiversity in their classes?

For instance, a group of students on a regular course could also have a shadow course going on in the Wikiversity.

Something like a discussion, perhaps?

Yes: having a discussion, commenting, helping, sharing notes… Whatever the wiki tool makes possible.

Is the Wikiversity compatible with Learning Management Systems such as Moodle or Sakai or do you instead see it as an alternative?

I definitely see it as an alternative. As a Learning Management System, it is quite poor because it doesn't have many features. But the fact of it being a social movement makes it strong. It's freely available online without any limitations to anybody to join it at any point. That makes it very different from any Learning Management Systems, and quite powerful, too.

Does this mean that anybody can participate in any course if they feel like?

Yes. If a group of students at a Barcelona university start a shadow project on some course they are doing, I could join them from Finland. There would not be any limit other than them saying “We don't want you”.

Is that actually happening?

There is always this kind of fight going on in wikis but there are also administrators monitoring and trying to negotiate when things like that happen.

What happens when you create or edit content? I mean, how do Wikipedia or the Wikiversity tell true and useful content from what is not?

Well, there are administrators following what is going on in there.

For every single entry?

There are many of them following the recent changes. But when you have a really big Wikipedia, like the English one, you need to have certain system following certain sections that may have tens of edits every second. It is being self-organizing itself, not from the top down, but from people taking responsibility and monitoring. For instance, a change coming from just an IP number with no username is probably something you should have a look of. And if there are tens of very quick edits, it may alert people that it is probably vandalism. There are certain technology systems making it possible to follow certain terms. However, there are still mistakes and problems with Wikipedia.

These systems are useful to fight against bad behaviour, but still do not face the philosophical challenge of telling the truth.

The beauty of any wiki is that it is a flow of information. It is like a river: you can't step into the same river twice in the same way you can't step into the same wiki twice. It's a living entity and that makes it quite interesting. It is just a matter of understanding this spirit and then using it for your own purposes.

Does the Wikiversity treat content the same way Wikipedia does?

It has some particularities. In Wikipedia there is this attempt to make an encyclopedia, so it has certain rules. For instance, it has the aim to be non-biased and it doesn't publish original research. These rules do not necessarily work for the Wikiversity because, when it comes to learning, the teacher or mentor – or even the community itself – is taking a subjective point of view. There is no need for neutrality.

This UNESCO Seminar focuses on how to overcome the digital divide. However, you are here to talk about the Wikiversity, which is something you can access only if you have an internet connection. Isn't that a contradiction?

Yes. But I try to think in terms of the long term. I'm not looking for what will happen in a year or two. I prefer to think about what will happen in five hundred years. In that scale, the Wikiversity and Wikipedia are definitely a small step in the right direction because the connectivity will come in one way or another. In fact, both factors are driving each other because if there is free knowledge available on the Web, it will make more sense for governments to invest in connectivity.

Do you think Wikipedia will change the way we have traditionally understood education?

I think it is already doing that. The best thing with these new technologies, like wikis or blogs, is not that they exist but that they are opening us up to talk about what learning is. We would not have this kind of debate in the educational sector without them.