Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Education Program extension: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 05:19, 25 August 2012

Revision as of 06:49, 25 August 2012

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*I do not like the ''must'' for this or anything at WP except the basic principles. Too many of the people who have gone through the past training programs have not actually done that well, and many people have done well without formal training--including every one of the first successful people, and including essentially everyone here in this discussions. The people who had inadequate guidance had inadequate guidance under the then official program and under the then official training. I am fairly sure the new program will do better, but I do not yet know how qualified we are to teach how to run courses. I naturally thing that I am, and in my experience so does everyone teaching a course at a college. They are not all right, and I may not be either. Education for things like WP is not a settled science. A

:as Sage says, and I think he has as much experience here as any of us, and it is his views I most trust in this, we are doing most of this for the first time. It stands to reason we will be doing this only partially right. There are only a handful of people who have run a course well, and I do not know if any of them , including most certainly myself , are really all that able to teach experience faculty how to teach WP. We are many of us qualified to teach people how to write for WP, but that's not the same thing. We have experience in that: we can tell faculty our experience. We know some of the things that can go wrong: we can explain them to faculty, but that's just the beginning. Effectively teaching people how to teach is extremely difficult--there are some general rules, and some obvious pitfalls, but much of it is very personal and idiosyncratic. At this point in the development of the program, I would discourage no one who wanted to try something different. Even two or three years from now, when we will have a few people who we know can consistently teach faculty how to teach WP, they will still not have a monopoly. WP lives by individual initiative and by encouraging anyone to edit. If I had wanted to do things the way I had been doing them, according to conventional wisdom, I would have stayed in the conventional system. I didn't come here to establish a replica. '''[[User:DGG| DGG]]''' ([[User talk:DGG| talk ]]) 05:19, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

::I agree that the WEP orientation should not be compulsory for instructors -- the only compulsory bit should be a community discussion (for user rights) where instructors demonstrate that they have the required clue (including understanding of Wikipedia and its goals) to guide a group of students around WP. We can also quiz the instructors on other things like the chosen subject area and the English language competency of their students. [[User:MER-C|MER-C]] 06:49, 25 August 2012 (UTC)