Friday, August 03, 2007

Openness gives learning a brand new future: Wikipedia founder

Taipei, Aug. 1 (CNA) A world without schools, in which children learn at home using tailor-made textbooks and educational programs was imaginatively invoked by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales Wednesday, who predicted that such a change in education will be brought about through the "openness" and "open source" movements.

The 40-year-old American internet entrepreneur, who founded the popular multilingual web-based free content encyclopedia, attended the "Openness in the 21st Century" forum on the eve of Wikimania 2007, an international Wikimedia conference which will be held from Aug. 3 - 5.

Wikipedia, which was created in 2001 and soon grew into one of the largest reference Web sites, is a model of voluntary collaboration and global contribution, with articles that can be edited by anyone with Internet access.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge, " Wales said in describing the motivation behind Wikipedia in a 2004 interview with Slashdot. The project has been trying to make that vision a reality through the accumulation of basic and neutral information, cross-referencing, citation and the always on-going editing.

Its "peer-to-peer" editing process is far different from the "top down" process behind the production of traditional encyclopedias and textbooks.

Wales pointed to the example of software projects, which tend to grow more robust and perform better after becoming "open-source" and being co-developed by professional enthusiasts, while remaining free of charge.

Education might undergo the same type of evolution through the introduction of a mentality of openness, said Wales, himself a product of home-schooling who later took a Ph. D finance program at Indiana University.

The current school-based educational system is outdated and not well-suited to serving all students' needs, he claims, then predicts that textbook copyrights in the future will be freely licensed, and that social communities will become major sources of knowledge production.

Wales says he need look no further than his own family for an example of what is to come. His daughter, Kira, has received all of her education at home and now is studying third grade mathematics although still a kindergartner. Wales uses a home-learning program he found in Singapore to help Kira with the content and schedule of her schooling.

In the future, the Internet will provide children and students with various learning methods, he said, and best of all, deliver the knowledge at a low cost.