Hi Allen,
Thanks for your email, and great to meet you at the Reed College solstice party.
Thinking of MIT OCW-centric wiki World University and School as having two main wings can be fruitful - a) open wiki schools planned for all 7,106 languages on the one hand each a wiki page to begin - and b) CC MIT OCW-centric accrediting WUAS online university degrees - for bachelor, Ph.D., law and M.D. as well as I.B. high school diplomas, first in English then in U.N. and large languages - accrediting in many of the 242 countries of the world, on the other. CC Wikipedia is in 288 languages and CC MIT OCW is in at least 8 non-English languages. CC WUaS has about 685 pages, almost all in English at this point.
Cash-strapped for about 6 years now (and WUaS hasn't hired yet), WUaS hasn't been able to move out of the current free Wikia wiki to the newly developed (in the past two years) inter-lingual C.C. Wikidata/Wikibase wiki designed for Wikipedia's languages.
Community will grow face-to-face richly in group video with the WUaS matriculated classes, planned first in English at the undergraduate level, applying in the autumn of 2015 - see for example - http://scott-macleod.blogspot. com/2014/12/minuartia-growing- online-face-to-face.html (click on the Reed College label, for example) - and many other blog entries here about a variety of creative developments at WUaS.
The wiki schools' aspect of WUaS is also generative of conversation (and thus a kind of community) as open learning and teaching (think Reed's Paideia - education in a broad sense - but as wiki) ...
WUaS's format will be Wikipedia-informed since their new CC inter-lingual database is far-reaching ... and for many other reasons, including building an universal translator (http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/WUaS_Universal_Translator) as well as WUaS planning a Music School (http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/World_University_Music_School) with each instrument a wiki subject page to begin, potentially in each of all languages. ..
I think free (since CC - Creative Commons' licensed) and MIT (OCW) degrees online (http://worlduniversity.wikia.com/wiki/Admissions_at_World_University_and_School#World_University_and_School_Links) will attract the right participants (high achievers interested in ideas and STEM as well as knowledge generation and even engineering careers) over time - since WUaS would like them to commit to taking 32 courses (and WUaS will be paying BPPE and especially WASC senior a per student per annum fee that WUaS won't want to throw away through attrition).
As an example of an open wiki subject at WUaS and how WUaS works, vis-a-vis your interests, here's the "Future" wiki subject - http://worlduniversity. wikia.com/wiki/Future - with currently one MIT OCW course - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/ special-programs/sp-256-the- coming-years-spring-2008/ - and where you can add resources, or teach to your web camera, for example, and generate both community, as well as knowledge- or creative-oriented conversations about this in new ways, for example. Or you could start a new related subject, linking this on this page here - http://worlduniversity.wikia. com/wiki/Future#World_ University_and_School_Links. Student interns in the WUaS degree programs (eventually in large languages), or volunteers, for example, may well further develop these "Future" pages further, and as the Future unfolds (does the future unfold?:).
Thanks very much for your thinking about and focus of inquiry on WUaS ... and I look forward to reading your further questions, observations and thoughts, given the above plans.
Thanks and cheers.
Best regards,
Scott
PS
Here's WUaS's blog -
and here's WUaS on Twitter -
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Here's Allen's initial email to which the above is a reply:
Scott,
Here's Allen's initial email to which the above is a reply:
Scott,
I was glad to meet you and enjoyed talking. I looked briefly at http://worlduniversity. wikia.com/. I think it has great potential, but it's unclear how to arrange for that potential to be realized. Ideally, the better mouse trap is in place, so the customers will come and make the venture succeed. But until there are enough participants to make it useful (granted, just having the links to the MIT courses provides some usefulness, albeit limited), it is not all that compelling. I don't mean to be discouraging, but I see this as a challenge that must be overcome, and I'm not convinced it will be automatically overcome by presenting the site to the world. Maybe that will suffice, but I would not take it for granted. If you have plans for dealing with this issue, I'm interested in hearing about them. ...
Allen
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