text:
Careers and Employment

Career describes an individual's journey through learning, work and other aspects of life. Employment is a relationship between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. This learning project is designed to assist learners in career selection and employment searches.

Career Selection
One approach to career selection is to recognize personal preferences for working with people vs. things, and working with ideas vs. data. The ACT organization uses these four broad categories to identify different careers and their placement on a World of Work map. ACT tests are often given to secondary school students in the United States to help them identify and select career preferences and determine college readiness.

Job-related terminology
This section will list terms of/related to Careers and Employment:
 * Applicant - Person who wants a job and fills out an application. An applicant could be anyone who has a desire to work. Reasons are listed above.
 * Employee - A working person who gets a salary.
 * Employer - A person/company that hires and pays a worker.
 * Job Application - A form you complete to get a job.
 * Reference - Someone who can comment about an applicant's quality of work. This person cannot be a family relative [due to bias], but an adult, teacher, or friends of family.
 * Supervisor - A person who checks your work and evaluates your performance.
 * Volunteer - A working person who donates their time and ability without receiving pay.
 * Blue/White Collar Jobs - Blue: Jobs that do physical labor, like factory workers, miners, or mechanics; White: Positions requiring a color degree, like doctors, lawyers, business workers, or teachers.
 * Pink/Green Collar Jobs - Pink: Office jobs usually held by women (secretaries, receptionists); Green: Jobs that help the environment.
 * Service-Oriented Jobs - Jobs that go something for a commuter.
 * Hourly workers - Employees that get paid for the exact number of hours they work.
 * Salaried workers - Employees that get paid the same amount every time (it doesn't matter how long they have worked).
 * Fringe benefits - Other ways of getting paid besides a salary (Bonuses, commission, expense accounts, etc.).

Why people want a Job
Some well-known reasons why some individuals, especially teenagers, like to work:
 * Money: Pay bills and buy whatever they desire for
 * Contribute to Society
 * Pride, ego, self-esteem
 * Job satisfaction: Love what they do
 * Get out of the house [If they did not do a job, they would be bored]
 * People-friendly [Like to be with people]

Preparations for a Job

 * It's essential to know what days/times you and your parents have decided for you to work. An example being you work on the weekends from 1:00PM - 5:00PM.
 * Know how you're going to get to work (train, car, rickshaw).
 * Who your references are and their phone numbers.
 * If you have to go through a job interview, then prepare for that.

Finding a Job

 * Ask the people around you (community, school, clubs, etc.).
 * Ads in the newspaper.
 * Online websites (Internet).
 * Employment agencies: You have to pay them, and they will look for a job for you.
 * Go directly to businesses: Walk into a KFC and ask if they need any new workers.
 * Headhunter: Finds you, no need to pay them because the company has paid them to find workers to work for them.

Skills for a Job

 * Know how to read.
 * Know how to write.
 * Know how to speak [language (English, etc.)].
 * Math: Arithmetic.
 * Computer skills (typing fast, how to graph, etc.).
 * Able to work without supervision once you've been trained (basically, a keen listener).

How to keep a Job

 * Do your work properly, not sloppy.
 * Be punctual (be on time).
 * Restrict your emotions (workers/boss being nasty).
 * Dress appropriately.
 * Don't waste your time at your workplace.
 * Have a good attitude.
 * Respect others, even you don't like them.

Employment Search

 * /Job Hunting/
 * /Search Recommendations/
 * IT Careers
 * Information about jobs, careers, and occupations

List of Jobs
A list of many different jobs that people pursue.

 * Accounting
 * Babysitting
 * Cab Driving
 * Dancing
 * Ecology
 * Garbage Collecting
 * Hairdressing
 * Illustrating
 * Jailing
 * Laboring
 * Magic
 * Navigation
 * Operating
 * Painting
 * Quarterbacking
 * Radiology
 * Sailing
 * Tailoring
 * Umpiring
 * Valeting
 * Serving
 * Zookeeping
 * Acting
 * Baking
 * Calligraphing
 * Dentistry
 * Economizing
 * Farming
 * Gardening
 * Harp Playing
 * Importing
 * Janitoring
 * Land Lording
 * Cleaning
 * Negotiating
 * Ophthalmology
 * Paleontology
 * Ranching
 * Selling
 * Tax Collecting
 * Undertaking
 * Military Servicing
 * Zoology
 * Banking
 * Captaining
 * Deputing
 * Editing
 * Filmmaking
 * Gathering
 * Hunting
 * Instructing
 * Laundering
 * Mail Carrying
 * Witnessing
 * Optician Ing
 * Taxi Driving
 * Jail Keeping
 * Advising
 * Barbering
 * Cardiology
 * Dermatology
 * Educating
 * Financing
 * Gem Cutting
 * Internship Ing
 * Jeweling
 * Lawing
 * Managing
 * Ornithology
 * Pathology
 * Real Estate Agency
 * Taxidermy
 * Warring

title: Careers and Employment


text: Wikiversity:Professor

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Wikiversity:Professor


text:
Careers and Employment/Job Hunting

Part of a series of guides at Careers and Employment

If you are unfamiliar with the term job hunting then read the article on Wikipedia to enlighten yourself.

Overview
Here is the basic process to find a job. If you find a full time job, then, you can expect to work for about 40 hours a week, at least. Know what type of job(s) you might be interested in or qualified for. The basic process is as follows.
 * 1) Make finding a job your priority. Expect to devote a considerable amount of time to this.
 * 2) Know your preferences. Knowing what type of employment you're willing to accept (e.g. working at McDonalds or working as a software engineer at Google) is key to job search.
 * 3) Create a resume and cover letter.
 * 4) Explore the internet. Try to fill out a job application through search engines and job links online.
 * 5) Fill out job applications and/or send in resumes and cover letters
 * 6) Get interviews
 * 7) Go to interviews
 * 8) Accept employment

Remember, don't give up. Make finding a job your Job.

Resume writing
There are a number of guides that go into the mechanics of resume writing. So, it is unnecessary to go through them here. However, very few of them go into the psychology of resume writing, which is why it is sometimes difficult to write a resume.

One key trick is this....

The resume is a 30 second commercial about you. It is not an autobiography.

If you think of the resume as an autobiography, then writing it becomes difficult because adding and removing things means making a commentary about your life. If it is a 30 second commercial, then it becomes much easier. You are coming up with a jingle, and the resume is a piece of promotional literature.

When you write your resume, think about it as your marketing tool and not only your personal document. Below are some tips and suggestions on how to write an attractive resume. Some of the main tips for writing a good resume are:
 * Use Titles/Headings that match the jobs you are applying for
 * Use an attractive design
 * Mention your skills, knowledge, and experience
 * Make a list of your training and education
 * Describe your accomplishment
 * Quantify and use power words
 * Analyze the job description to Identify key words
 * Tweak and target your resumes

title: Careers and Employment/Job Hunting


text:
Homeschooling

This is Wikiversity's central resource for Homeschooling.

Homeschooling basics

Homeschooling is a method of childhood education which eschews mainstream mass schooling in the form of government or private schools and keeps the responsibility and implementation of education directly in the hands of the child's own parents. Some homeschoolers believe that the education they provide for their children from home is a better preparation for adulthood than the institutional options available to them. Homeschooling is a diverse movement, stretching across economic, racial, religious and political groups.

As parents vary in their reasons and philosophies of homeschooling, the methods employed are equally diverse, as each family chooses the education that best suits its children and circumstances. Though very few generalizations can be made, perhaps one can say that homeschoolers as a whole:

 * find mass schooling an inefficient use of the child's time.
 * believe individual and parental rights supersede government interest in the child.
 * homeschool out of a desire to give their children a superior education.
 * reserve the right to define education for their own family.

Parents who choose to homeschool may do so because they find mass schooling:
 * too religious or not religious enough.
 * too demanding or not rigorous enough.
 * moving too quickly or too slowly for their child.
 * unsafe or too confining.
 * too intrusive or too unresponsive.

Homeschooling is legal in the United States, though regulated variously. Some states have an entirely hands-off policy while others require differing levels of notification or oversight. All states have many support groups which can provide information, interaction, and learning opportunities.

History and General Information

Perspectives
Methods of homeschooling, which are often combined or modified in practice, include:

 * Charlotte Mason- A British educator who invested her life in improving the quality of children's education. Her ideas led to one of the primary methods of homeschooling.
 * Networked learning- A process of developing and maintaining connections with people and information, and communicating in such a way so as to support one another's learning.
 * Unit Study- It is defined as an in-depth study of a topic (space, trees, cars, etc.) that takes into account many areas of the topic, such as geography, science, history, art, etc. It is a complete immersion into the topic so that the student will see things as a "whole" instead of bits and pieces learned throughout their education.
 * Unschooling- unschoolers find that the use of standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are unnecessary and sometimes counterproductive for maximizing the education of each child. Instead, unschoolers typically allow children to learn through their natural life experiences, including game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction.

Pros and Cons
Pros:
 * Educational Freedom
 * Physical Freedom
 * Religious Freedom
 * Closer Family Relationships
 * Stability During Difficult Times
 * Well-Rested Kids
 * No Busy Work

Cons:
 * The Time Restraints
 * Financial Restraints
 * Limited Interaction With Other Kids
 * Being with Your Kids 24/7
 * Limited Team Sports
 * Living Outside the Norm

Courses and Learning Materials

 * Primary school homeschooling resource guide
 * Secondary school resource guide
 * Portal:Education

Resources
John Holt and His Ideas: Home School Legal Defense Association (official site) Homeschool Curriculum and Homeschooling Information Other Resources:
 * Growing Without Schools(biography and his books)
 * JOHN HOLT AND THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY HOMESCHOOLING by Patrick Farenga
 * Home School Legal Defense Association (Reconstructionist agenda)
 * Home Schooling laws by state (Incomplete and often inaccurate)
 * International School In Hyderabad (an International Homeschool Program)
 * A to Z Home's Cool (contains many ads, inclusive support, free and commercial resources)
 * Pro Publica - Homeschool Laws
 * Homeschool World (uses popups - contains many ads, Reconstructionist agenda)
 * Homeschool.com (contains many ads)
 * National Independent Study Accreditation Council (Accreditation for Homeschool Programs)
 * Sunland Christian School (an International Homeschool Program)
 * Homeschool Base (volunteer-driven resource and homeschooling news)
 * National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI conducts homeschooling research)
 * FamilyEducation.com

US Resources by State

 * /California/

title: Homeschooling


text:
Wikiversity:Case studies

Here are a list of case studies about online universities with experiences that might be useful to wikiversity

Cool study on how location is no longer as important

http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2006/08/09/big-schools-are-not-longer-giving-researchers-an-edge/

http://palinurus.english.ucsb.edu/BIBLIO-UNIVERSITY-history-of-university.html

http://www.aau.edu/education/Merkel.pdf

University of Phoenix
The good thing about University of Phoenix is that it shows that certain things are possible. What UoP does is to use large numbers of adjunct faculty, create strong student groups, and then it is very strong on faculty training and evaluation.

The problems with the UoP model

 * adjunct faculty are getting vastly short changed. You have 10 students that pay $1000 per course, and the faculty gets $1000.  It *is* true that UoP provides huge amounts of academic support, but I suspect that it can be done more cheaply.

 * there are some definite conflicts of interest between UoP marketing and academics. Suppose UoP has a class that makes students really think about whether or not they want to be an MBA.  It's not in UoP's interest to make students think about this, since they might conclude that they don't want/need an MBA.

 * issues of control. high-level knowledge production requires strong social networks and collective action.  UoP discourages these networks and collective action.  Once adjunct faculty start talking about developing new course, that moves control from the administration to the adjuncts, and once faculty start talking with each other about new courses, they are likely also going to be starting to talk to each other about pay and working conditions.

Olin College
Started with $500,000 and 300 students. The main thing that Olin had was very strong support from big name engineering types.

Virtual Online University
One effort that was started in the mid-1990 using MOO's. What I think happened

 * MOO's created tight social networks
 * People used those social networks to create institutions of learning
 * Then commercial entities (Yahoo, AOL, Gaim) offered IM and other alternatives
 * This killed the social networks

What I (User:Roadrunner) learned

 * You have to be willing and able to provide open source platforms. Having closed-source platforms is BAD because they attract people, but the platform users are unwilling to make changes to support academics.
 * Be careful of internecine warfare. One of the things about Wikipedia is that it has the critical mass so that no one flame war consumes the community and because there aren't key locuses of power that are targets for warfare.  In a small community, these fights divided up people.
 * Interoperability is important. MOO's were never really interoperable so that improvements in X MOO get put into another one.
 * Open standards and code are important. MediaMOO died after the major entities tried to start a commercial company and then got bought out by Microsoft.

Globewide Network Academy
http://www.gnacademy.org/

Now just a database of distance learning courses. I (User:Roadrunner) am still president.

I learned a *huge* amount about educational administration. The main points

 * to have a functioning institution, you need to worry about money, politics, and funding
 * I don't like worrying about money, politics, and funding
 * In the early stages people are willing to do a lot of stuff for free because of the novelity. After a technology becomes mature, the novelity factor wears off and you need to have funding, *if* your project is less than a critical mass of people.  If you have a large number of people then people get social capital from participating, and you can divide up the work so that people do what they like.

There is some hugely useful stuff on there, that needs to be moved over were the wikimedia social network can get at it.

Roadrunner 06:37, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

More notes on the MOO Universities of the 1990's
I think that three of the things that I learned in working on GNAcademy are

1) that traditional academia is less solid and impressive than it looks from the outside 2) that organizational stability and money are important (and that I hated working on these issues). 3) and that you really, really need to get a free culture infrastructure

Someone probably should do a study on the rise and fall of MOO universities of the 1990's. The basic problem is that because people in the MOO environment were anti-commercial, there wasn't too much effort put into raising money through grants and other items. The problem then was that the technical architecture sufferred which meant that ordinary people started using yahoo chat, which meant that the community just collapsed. Something that WF needs to do is to make sure that the really key developers get funding to work on open source enhancements to MediaWiki. Something that killed MOO's is that the key developers started working on closed source projects.

So the effort that the Wikimedia Foundation is putting into organizational stability and WYSIWYG ease of use is exactly the right thing to do. What I'd like to see wikiversity do is to serve as an enabler to help ordinary people get access to NSF grants and the like.

Another thing to keep in mind is that A lot of projects are done by undergraduate students and graduate students who have huge reserves of time, energy, and new ideas, and not that much money. The problem happens when graduate students no longer are graduate students and have families and mortgages which require money to keep up. At this point a huge amount of experience just leaves the pool. If we really want to develop wikiversity, we need to look at the human lifecycle and develop institutions that work through the parenting years into retirement.

The other thing that undergraduates and graduate students need to be aware of. The system is horribly exploiting your enthusiasm and new ideas and horribly underpaying you all. I don't know if anything can be done about it, but just realize that the problem exists.

Roadrunner 15:04, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

title: Wikiversity:Case studies


text:
Wikiversity:Teacher advising

Different academic models:

University of Phoenix model
Courses are one month, when the students time devoted just to one course. Instructor provides weekly feedback to all students. Discussion is stimulated by instructor and is on an NNTP server which is accessible via outlook. Most professors are adjunct faculty. Tuition is $1000 per student with the faculty getting about $1000 in the end. Student evaluations done at the end.

Advantages

 * Uses only non-proprietary software
 * High student interaction

Disadvantages

 * May not be suitable for situations where learning requires time for information to seep in or where students have radically different levels of preparedness.

title: Wikiversity:Teacher advising


text:
Free lance scholar/Financial

Examples
Add your own section to let others in on your plans.

My academic budget
This gives you some idea of what it costs to be a free lance scholar

One month US$1000/month

which gives you $300/month travel to Boston/NYC. $300/month for one week hotels. and then $400/month for books and other expenses.

It is possible given the current internet culture to be a free lance scholar on much less, provided you have web access and/or live near a library or possibly a book store with a free read policy. Or to paraphrase the movie Good Will Hunting Your entire education can boil down to overdue library charges and internet fees, if you are exceptionally motivated and able to digest the information. Of course you will not recieve the recognition for your work unless you are able to access the culture of peer review, and understand the basic conventions of said culture. Access to the culture is becoming easier thanks again to the internet.

Roadrunner 06:52, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Quintessential skill set
I have little or no access to funds. I have worked for so long without money, it has become second-nature for me to deal with performance and operational matters without currency. The products and services I offer need only attention for prospective collaborators. The trick is to reduce expenses and gather resources directly from nature's surpluses. I could use a welding machine. I made a loom by hand and used it to weave a guitar strap. I'm working on a plan to build a bio-dome over a 40 ft deep well and a solar-powered pump made from a unique donut design from the public domain. I can train animals. I play a mean guitar and a big piano. I need some help with bandwidth, but other than that, the life I want is coming together. Wikiversity is a big help.

CQ 20:28, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

title: Free lance scholar/Financial


text:
Wikiversity:Library services

Here is a repository of free textbooks and educational materials:

The question: How does one get access to online database?

General

 * Wikibooks (multilingual) - all resources are freely accessible and copyleft
 * Wikisource (multilingual) - all resources are freely accessible and copyleft
 * LookSmart Find Articles - hosts HTML versions of countless journals; many of the articles are free to access
 * Google Books - full text search for countless books; some have full text available
 * Textbook Revolution
 * Cornell University Library
 * The National Academies Press - PDF books both free and for sale
 * Project Gutenberg
 * The Open Library - a project of the Internet Archive

Subject-specific

 * Digital Library for Physics and Astronomy
 * Textbooks in Mathematics
 * FreeBooks4Doctors medical books

Public libraries
The following passage is adapted from http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/001285.php.

From Wikipedia

 * Wikipedia:Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/OA

Several large public libraries in the U.S.A. provide electronic access to vast document collections. Some of these libraries sell memberships for about $100 (annual membership fee) that allow access to commercial document databases. For example, the San Francisco Public Library provides access to about 100 document databases to members. The that to get a library card from the San Francisco Public Library you must prove residence in the state of California. Anyone living in California can get a library card for the San Francisco Public Library (for free) that give access to the JSTOR online journals. To get your card you need to go to the library in person.

Ohio and Michigan have consortiums of public libraries that provide access to many databases.

The New York Public Library allows membership to non-residents of New York and remote (internet) access to about 85 of its 300 document databases. These 85 databases do not include the JSTOR database. Access is provided to collections of e-books, audio books, and videos that are available for legal downloading. For the New York Public Library you can apply online and receive your card by mail.

title: Wikiversity:Library services


text:
School talk:Music and Dance

I made significant changes to this page. Please restore it. --Fang Aili talk 19:45, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. -- sebmol ? 19:53, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Foundation of the school of Music and dance
August 15, 2006

Logo
Just wondering what the general consensus was about the banner logo that was over in the Wikibooks domain. My guess is that it hasn't because images were not included in the move. I'm wondering what the consensus is about the logo. Jechasteen 09:24, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep the logo at least for now. --Hd.G 20:04, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Use new logo. I like the logo.

Proposed Change to Courses
What would people think of combining the Musicology and History curricula into one? It seems like both musicology and history contain topics pertaining to the historical aspects of music. Jechasteen 09:30, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

I agree, however, more simply, why don't we just delete history. Pianist 18:37, 29th August 2006

I disagree with Pianist - Histroy to me seems more bare facts, dates and events and such, and Musicology more cultural and meaningful. alikona 23:09, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, I disagree with Alisone. The study of music and cultures would be "Ethnomusicology." You can reference the wiktionary article here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnomusicology). Music History and Musicology are synonymous, as they are both the scholarly study of music and the history of music. I think that all history courses should be divided into two categories, Western and non-Western. In general, Western courses would fall under Musicology, and likewise the non-Western courses would fall under Ethnomusicology. This was the curriculum at the school where I received my undergrad, and the design was very intelligent and practical. Just a thought. :o)   --Richums 14:36, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

 * I don't know much about the subject, but I would also tend to see "musicology" as incorporating "history of music" - and a chronology of music could comprise a part of this. However, I find "ethnomusicology" a problematic term, as it is inherently "western"-centric, and I don't see how splitting up music into a dichotomous "western" and "non-western" is any more logical than any other split. How about simply having an organiser page, Topic:Musicology, that can split into the study of various musical genres/traditions by various criteria or levels of focus? Terms that are ambiguous, like ethnomusicology, could either be redirects to other more interdisciplinary pages, or have their own pages which would explore the term, why it exists, and why some think it is problematic. Thoughts? Cormaggio talk 14:54, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

 * I see your point on the split (Western and non-Western). I suppose for a global resource, that would not be the most effective way of doing it.  Sometimes I forget just how big the Internet is.  :o)  As far as enthomusicology goes, however, I have to disagree with you.  Ethnomusicology is a field that exists all over the world.  Think of it this way: "the study of people making music."  It is not confined to any particular geographic region, nor is it bound by western ideals or thought - It truly is universal.  Here is a good resource:  (http://www.lib.washington.edu/music/world.html).  I definitely think that Musicology and Ethnomusicology could be two separate subject areas, however for organization's sake, I agree that Ethnomusicology could fall under Musicology in a hierarchy.  So your idea on the organizer page Topic:Musicology is a good idea.  Richums 15:50, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

 * Thanks. I love that comment about the size of the internet. :-) And just to "translate" your point into possible structure, Topic:Ethnomusicology could be a subsection of Topic:Musicology... Cormaggio talk 17:14, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Portal:Music
Portal:Music was imported from Wikibooks. It has the author history of the original School of Music page. Please coordinate Portal:Music with School:Music. --JWSchmidt 00:34, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
 * There are tons of subpages there, you guys would do well to get them coordinated with School:Music.-- digital  _  me   17:17, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

Departments etc.
Quick idea based on the wikibooks idea:

Creation of the following departments:

Performance (see note below) Theory and Composition Musicology Jazz Studies

These would have the obvious subject areas in their remit. Also we would need to appoint 'deans' to each of these departments. However, for performance, due to the large number of different instruments, having a dean for the department, then individual teachers or lecturers for each instrument.

I think it would be best if we delayed the appointment of the 'head' till we have a better experience as to who is good at dong what. --Pianist 18:56, 29th August 2006

On second thoughts, forget having a structure. I think it would be better if things were open for contributions - I will be trying out various ideas on the Piano page. --Pianist

 * The latter approach usually works better on Wikis - the structure sort of appears spontaneously, and miraculously works. --HappyCamper 22:17, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

 * "need to appoint 'deans' .... then individual teachers or lecturers for each instrument" <-- Wikiversity does not have appointed "deans", "teachers" or "lecturers". Wikiversity has participants. Some participants will spend more time producing useful educational content and functioning like a teacher. Doing so does not require a title, it is just a matter of participating in the collaborative learning process. --JWSchmidt 22:28, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

 * Sure. I get what you mean, point taken. Suggestion abandoned. --Pianist

Play music on page
Is there anyway of embedding music so that it plays in the background of a page?--Rayc 03:20, 6 September 2006 (UTC) With certain HTML tags, yes, but I'm fairly sure these HTML tags are banned in mediawiki (or cannot be used anyway e.g. body). --Draicone (talk) 05:30, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

 * and for good reason. ;o)  Richums 15:52, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

 * see this --JWSchmidt 16:14, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Proposal for research of Music History and Cultures
This is an idea I had a while ago that might interest some of you, I didn't really know where to start and if we could work on this, it would be great.

The idea was to make "The genealogy of music genres". The idea is to retrace every modern music genres' ansestors going as far back as posible, and i'm not talking of saying "Rock" to include Rock and Roll, Metal, Alternative, but to get in depth with the genres... Example: "Nu-Metal" (Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Crazytown etc...) As been inspired by "Industrial Metal", "Hip-Hop", "Grunge", etc... one generation back would be the same, but for "Industrial Metal", "Hip-Hop", "Grunge", etc... And find information about the cultures and History of the Genres

This is obviously not a complete proposal, but i'm giving the idea... would anyone be interested in researching this along with me? --Halyks 17:16, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

 * What markers would you used to identifiy which types are related to which other types? This probably has been done somewhere, but it would be a great learning excersize anyway, and an interesting way of teaching it.--Rayc 02:48, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I thought of making it kinda like a Family Tree, Throught "Generations"... we'd have to deside a point in time and tag it's most recently "created" musical genres as "Generation 0" and put everything back as "Generation -1", "Generation -2" and everything that will come later as "generation 1", "generation 2" etc... A quick idea for Generation 0 could be Janurary 1st 2007. Something similar has been made by a man called Sam Dunn for his DVD documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey the Genealogy of Heavy Metal is avalible on the Bonus Disk of the documentary but it only covers the genres derived from "Early Metal" (Witch includes bands like Black Sabbath) to New Wave of American Metal (Most of the 2000s Metal bands) and his family tree is really confusing. I'd like to make it for every genres that exists (lots of work to do).-- Halyks 16:14, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

 * Do you mean ethnomusicology? --CharlieHuang 10:09, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
 * No, I mean the subcultures that music created... not the cultures that makes the music... although it would be a good idea to do both... --Halyks 16:14, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

 * I'd just be bold, and start making a page somewhere. We can move pages around on Wikiversity, so if the idea seems to fit somewhere else, we can fix things easily. --HappyCamper 03:37, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Audio clips
This school seems to be attracting a lot of edits from established and IP users, which is quite nice. I wonder if we should consider looking at how to make audio clips? --HappyCamper 03:39, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

Images?
Would it make sense to add a few relevant images to the school / portal page? I uploaded Image:Clair de lune.jpg recently and was hoping it could be useful. (It is public domain) --Draicone (talk) 05:31, 5 October 2006 (UTC) That would make more sense. I have no idea how to get a picture in to Wikiversity, but, I will try to find out. --Unionhawk 20:29, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Music History
I've left a note on the School page, but I'd like to suggest that you notify the History School of any History courses you offer here, so that they may work together with you, or, if nothing else, list these classes in the School of History, as well. Thanks! The Jade Knight 06:39, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

 * Great idea! This would open up a lot of overlapping topics which would draw people to both departments.  Richums 15:54, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Tabla
Hi there, I'm only just a new learner of Tabla, but I notice there's sweet noting for resources for the learner on the web (mainly sites advertising gurus). Since I have a Guru and I don't want to buy more or move, I figured there might be others looking for a learning project??--Dnjkirk 07:38, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

Double Bass
The double bass suffers from an identity crisis. Possible names include (but are not limited to): string bass, contrabass, upright bass, bass viol, double bass, bull fiddle, or just plain old "bass." But the generally accepted proper English term for most conservatories is "Double Bass." I suggest changing the bass entry and landing page to be "double bass," and creating a separate one for "bass guitar" to include it's fretted and most-often electric cousin if we feel that this is needed. The two instruments are really different, despite the tuning and range similarities, and it might be best to keep things focused and separated. Sanbeiji 20:09, 23 October 2006 (UTC)sanbeiji

Interdisciplinary course
I've created a course on the History of Ireland through Song. Feel free to mention it here. The Jade Knight 04:03, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

splitting music and dance
Perhaps music and dance are simply expressions originating from the human capability of recognizing and creating Melody. Both of these schools could be in the criteria for "The School of Melodic Expression". It is a distillation of complicated matters, simplifying them into the core essence of their origination, which is the facultys of human intelligence. (ie.. Music and Dance are expressions of Human Melodic capabilities and Creation. ) Kind Regards, Feed back welcomed Gaon Yincang Abhinava 15:24, 22 July 2011 (UTC) 7/22/2011 10:11am  limitsaremirages@yahoo.com

doing google searches on "school of dance" and "school of music" each display what seems to be rather distinct results. perhaps the schools should be split into two different schools, "School:Dance" and "School:Music"(currently redirect), respectively. --Remi 09:01, 19 February 2008 (UTC)

I very much agree! --BigBear 18:15, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

 * I also agree; from my side of the divide (music), there is plenty of material - if only some of us would write it ;) - to make a School of Music itself. Although knowing the dances, especially the Baroque ones, are necessary for proper realisation of tempos, this link is similar to the one between music and history (although less so, I think?). I'll stick a 'split' template on the school. Besides, I think that most of the material here is music-related anyway! Gaidheal1 21:40, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

Comment. Split. I tend to support split on the basis that music is more amenable to online instruction. Admittedly there are hands on aspects of experiential learning which one cannot grasp sitting in front of a monitor, but IMO the dynamics are waaay different in terms of how the content, material or modality (music/dance) interacts with the medium of online cyber-learning collaboration. Probably the music material will grow at a much faster rate. Also, School of Music and Dance, in the form of American English I am accustomed to, has a specific connotation which is not consistent with a School of Music, particularly the kind of gritty, down home music associated with folk, traditional and country. Dance is implicitly there and will be part of cirriculum insofar as it is integral to the essence of music, but as far as a naming convention, it's a No-Go from the git go. Four of us are in agreement, with no dissenters who have spoken to this point. I would like this thread to close and move to implementation sooner rather than later, thanks. GeoBardRap 00:03, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

 * Split. I absolutely support splitting this school to Music and to Dance.  I'm seeing a number of other clunky "schools" and "school subjects" in the Browse area (e.g., why is Music in "Content by school subject", but not itself a "School".  I think Wikiversity needs a major overhaul in organizing the content found here. -- Thekohser 14:22, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

 * What about renaming it to School:Performing Arts? "Performing arts include the dance, music, opera, drama, magic, Spoken word, circus arts and musicals". -- dark lama  14:59, 20 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I disagree with this point of view. Musical composition is not a performing art (and if it is, someone should notify funding institutions). El erno (talk) 17:47, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

 * Being a professional musician, I also share the opinion that music and dance should be separate schools. While there are a lot of aspects where these two disciplines intersect -tempi of dances as Gaidheal1] point out being a good example- We do look at these intersections from different points of view. An example of this is how we structure time.[[User:El erno|El erno (talk) 17:47, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Fiddle and Violin
I have restored the link to "Fiddle", as this links to a resource page. Please see Fiddle or Violin. Perhaps it would be helpful to discuss such removals before simply making them, thanks.Leutha 23:35, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Because I believe the term 'fiddle' to relate more to a particular playing style than to a physical instrument, I removed it from what I perceived to be a list of physical instruments (apart from the voice parts, but they should be included anyway). Instead of just removing the link I could have put it somewhere else, but anyway. I admit that I come from a classical background and that therefore I am more likely to call it a violin, but I'm willing to hear you arguments for why 'fiddle' shouldn't appear in a sub-section entitled 'folk music and playing styles' (for example)! I look forward to working on the Music school with you! Gaidheal1 19:38, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I have no idea what is going on here but at first glance this looks like something to be handled with (1) multiple entries and (2) intermediary disambiguation. Remember fiddle is fiddle and violin is violin; both words do apply to physical instruments (variably defined) and to type of music (fiddle tunes, violin solos) as well in some instances to other categories...GeoBardRap 22:39, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Deleting mispelled redlinks from mainspace.
I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings or antagonize anyone in the School however the mainspace was cluttered with a lot of red links which were not even properly spelled. The most recent one was as follows:

 * Composition department (doesn't yet exist, but should be seperate from theory)

The word is spelled separate. I very seldom revert or delete anything, in many years on WMF, but in this case feel it is necessary for the good of the project. Thank you for your kind understanding.GeoBardRap 02:55, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Neither Schoo: Music nor School:Music and Dance populate
Neither populates the listings page for School wonder what is up with that.GeoBardRap 22:40, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Searching musicians
Hi,

I'm a regular contributor of the french version of Wikiversity. Since a few months, I try to write some music lessons, especially for jazz improvisation : https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/D%C3%A9partement:Jazz

I would like to know if there is here musicians who are interested in the same way and I hope to begin a collaboration with some others jazz-players, ideas exchange, bit of scores, tips, etc.

You can answer here or on my own page of discussion : https://fr.wikiversity.org/wiki/Discussion_utilisateur:Thierry613

Thanks a lot.

--Thierry613 (discuss • contribs) 22:06, 1 March 2015 (UTC)Thierry

PS Please excuse me for my poor english...

Dance department : top editors
09 III 16

 * Topic:Dance
 * en.wikiversity.org
 * Total des révisions: 13
 * Nombre de rédacteurs: 7
 * 2016-03-09 22:19:42

1 Nombre de modifications

2 Durée moyenne entre les modifications

Sorry, I didn't succeed to get the table in english... --Thierry613 (discuss • contribs) 16:55, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

title: School talk:Music and Dance


text: Portal:Interdisciplinary Studies

title: Portal:Interdisciplinary Studies


text:
School:Music and Dance

Welcome to the Wikiversity School of Music and Dance. This school has two departments listed below :

Departments

 * Music department
 * Dance department

Videos

 * Learn Renoise Beginner 1. What is Renoise - Learning about digital audio workstation Renoise.

title: School:Music and Dance


text:
Ecological sustainability

Welcome to the Wikiversity Division of Ecological Sustainability, Part of the School of Practical Human Life and Part of the School of Advanced General Studies.

Subdivisions and Departments
Like divisions, subdivisions and departments are pages in the Topic namespace) and their names start with the "Topic:" prefix. Individual departments can be used by multiple schools. Schools that use (link to) the same department should cooperate to develop the department. Subdivisions are used by large divisions to help organize related departments. Not all divisions have subdivisions. If you need a subdivision in your division, you can use the Template:Subdivision boilerplate template to start a subdivision.
 * Toxicology
 * Permaculture
 * Energy Efficiency
 * Eco-Design
 * Education
 * Ecovillage
 * Renewable Energy

Resources

 * Ecovillage Wiki
 * Peak oil, energy, and society

Back story
Some of the original participants were
 * 3 September 2006 - Division founded!
 * 13 March 2007 - Division affiliated with School of Agriculture
 * April 26, 2007 -- Division affiliated with School of Advanced General Studies
 * CQ 16:48, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Stilite
 * Dionysios (talk), a Participant in the Wikiversity School of Advanced General Studies, Date: 2007-04-26 (April 26, 2007) Time: 174101 UTC
 * Frederick 04:02, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

title: Ecological sustainability


text:
Physics Bachelor of Science

 * Note: Wikiversity does not confer academic degrees/diplomas/certificates etc.

See http://twofish.wordpress.com/the-open-architecture-degree/ for the theory behind this degree

Part of the School of Physics and Astronomy

 * Feedback on current degrees
 * Getting into physics graduate school
 * Todo

Links
http://www.unisa.ac.za/  South African University w/ Physics degree via mail

https://archive.is/20130630110838/www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1226150-5,00.html

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/373/ - Woodie Flowers on a liberal education for the 21st century

http://www.aau.edu/education/Merkel.pdf - Undergraduate Research

Help wanted: Need comments from the following

 * People familar with the Thomas Edison State College or Charter Oak procedures. Anyone who has gone or is going through their program

 * People familar with undergraduate physics degrees in other schools. People who are interesting in taking a physics undergraduate degree

 * People in graduate physics admission committees and employers

 * Students and potential students. Need to find out if this degree plan is attractive to people, and we may need some beta testers that are crazy enough to try to do this.

This page came out of wikimania 2006, and it's my effort to put together a curriculum which will get you an accreditted Bachelor of Science in Physics using free (as in speech) materials. The actual degree will be issued by what I call a "brokerage school" (i.e. someone like Thomas Edison State College) that turns life experience into credits. This will involve a lot of investigation into the little academic details of the schools.

The other thing that is important, is that I'd like to try to see how one could provide the "experience" of getting a Bachelor of Science in Physics. The crucial bit involves working in a research lab or getting an internship. That part is actually more important than the "book work" since getting an internship and letters of recommendation are what really get you into graduate school.

The other crucial part is that I need for this to be a degree that will actually get you into a physics doctoral program. So one thing that I will do is to ask people on graduate admission's committees their opinions on this. Also, something that would be useful is to just get a list of physics schools, and list whether or not they you should even think of applying there with a degree from wikiversity. (Again, the internships are more important than the book work, but we then need to look at the internships to see if they will take you.)

I'll also try to get some input from the professional societies (i.e. AAS, AIP etc.)

It will take me a few months to get this together, but since it is a wiki, feel free to add your contributions. I'll try to put enough of a sketch so that people can fill in material.

Roadrunner 07:23, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Here are the basic links

Here is the degree program for TESC

http://www.tesc.edu/prospective/undergraduate/degree/ba.php

For Charter Oak

http://www.charteroak.edu/Prospective/Programs/Concentrations/Physics.cfm

For Excelsior

https://www.excelsior.edu/portal/page?_pageid=57,55694&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

For MIT

http://web.mit.edu/physics/undergrad/index.html

One thing that is especially interesting for MIT is that they have changed the degree so that the main point is not to get into grad school as was the case in 1991. I'm using "creating a degree that will get you into grad school" as a requirement, because that is what I know. The problem is that what I'm doing is possibly self-defeating. If this works and you have hundreds of thousands of students qualified for physics graduate school and not a massive expansion in physics graduate schools, then this will be bad, which means that after this project is more or less complete, the next step is to figure out how to massively expand graduate education in physics, which gets into social priorities (you see now why I want discussions of getting funding).

This goes with my challenge to MIT. MIT does not scale. The trick reason that I'm doing this is that I think it would be good to be able to provide an MIT quality of undergraduate physics education to millions of people, and not just twenty year olds. The hard part in all of this involves generating the social networks and communities. The "book learning list" is just a skeleton.

Basic Strategy
The basic strategy is to use the MIT Course 8 curriculum as a template and then match it with the requirements of either Thomas Edison or Charter Oak which will issue the final degree. That's the easy part.

The hard part will be to find proxies for a lot of the expertial learning and social networking that occurs. The expertial learning will require some sort of intership, and possibly a tutorial model. The social networking will require finding communities if they already exist or building communities if they don't.

Roadrunner 07:55, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

MIT Course 8 Focused Option
Course VIII Focused Option

The Course VIII focused option is designed to provide the best possible preparation for graduate study in physics. Many students have also found this program to be an excellent, broad based preparation for professional work in related fields such as astrophysics, biophysics, geophysics, and many engineering disciplines. The focused option is unusual among pre-professional programs at MIT in that it offers a particularly large amount of elective freedom: as many as six subjects may be chosen as unrestricted electives without exceeding the minimum requirements for an undergraduate degree. The Departmental program for the focused option consists of the following required subjects and restricted electives. The full requirements for the degree, including the General Institute Requirements, may be found in the MIT Bulletin.

Required Subjects
 * 8.03 	Physics III vibrations and waves
 * 18.03 or 18.034 	Differential Equations
 * 8.033 	Relativity
 * 8.04 	Quantum mechanics I
 * 8.044 	Statistic mechanics I
 * 8.05 	Quantum Mechanics II
 * 8.06* CI-M 	Quantum Mechanics III
 * 8.13* CI-M 	Experimental Physics I
 * 8.14 	Experimental Physics II
 * 8.ThU Undergraduate Research Project

Restricted Electives One subject given by the Mathematics Department beyond 18.03 Two additional subjects given by the Physics Department beyond 8.02 including at least one of the following: : * 8.07
 * * 8.08 Classical mechanics
 * * 8.09

Textbooks
List of free physics textbooks: http://textbookrevolution.org/tag/physics/

This may be a sucker site. I attempted to download the zip version of Electromagnetism Field Theory alleged to be equivalent to the classic in the field authored by Jackson. I received nothing except long lists of advertisement and links to commercial products. user:lazyquasar

There are also some books on Gerard Hooft's page, mentioned above. user:derian

I found the following link through textbookrevolution, has a great list of open course content. http://opencontent.org/ocwfinder/ many of it's findings are on http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/ not sure how this will all fit in but throught I should through it out there. user:RichMac

Replicating the MIT experience
This is going to sound a bit like haliography but it isn't. It's an effort to demystify MIT. There are a lots of good things about an MIT degree, but if you go through and look at it point by point, there really isn't anything that can't be replicated in an open architecture. The goal here is to figure out how to scale the degree.

Notes on replicating the MIT physics degree; some comments on subfactors.

 * teamwork and social support - the key is replicating the social networks that form between students in the course of taking the degree. One thing that is the case is that physics students are incredibly supportive, and there is much too much work for any one student to do on their own.  The other thing is that there is very little in the way of a "weed out" mentality and the pass rates are actually quite high.  The other thing is having students constantly complain about the professors (some of whom are quite awful at teaching) is useful since you have a support group.
 * An obstacle in emulating mutual homework help (ahem) would be an efficient and easy way to enter equations in online, so that students can show their peers their partially-completed work. LaTeX looks pretty and is perhaps the fastest way to typeset equations, but it's really nothing like the real thing - fountain pen and parchment paper.
 * With an online course, there really isn't much to complain about the prof. A moderately evil prof expects that you've memorized the Navier-Stokes equation in spherical-tensor form, while a totally evil prof makes you do pointless contour integrals under timed constraints. But: Exams should be open book, since students are going to have book-itchy fingers during exams anyway (read: proctored by a virtual bot). In an advanced physics course, computational support from Mathematica, for example, should also be allowed during exams.

One thing that University of Phoenix has illustrated is that this sort of team building *can be replicated* online.

 * pace and pressure - MIT is a huge pressure cooker that results when you get lots of people with type A personalities in one place. (New York City is also the same way.)  The nice thing about MIT is that it teaches you how to manage stress.  This is actually something that you need to replicate, but it needs to be done very carefully.  The problem with pressure is that you need have safety nets available so that people don't get overwhelmed.  This is difficult enough in an physical environment, and it is really hard in an online environment.

My experience is that online, it's very easy for someone to "go dark" and disappear. The other problem with open architectures is the issue of "assumption of responsibility." If a student on the MIT campus has some serious medical issues, then MIT assumes responsibility. In an online environment this is harder.

 * rich environments - Walk down the hallways at MIT, and you can see something happening, and it's not hard to ask the right people and get involved in something that is happening. Just as an example, if you walk down the hall, you see vats of liquid nitrogen (they are like water fountains).  This affects your thinking in subtle ways.

 * science culture - You see seminars, people arguing, the process of reading and writing journal articles. How do we incorporate that into the curriculum.

Bad things

 * brutality - There is an element of brutality, but one thing that I found is that the element of brutality is nowhere as bad at MIT as it is in other places. Again, you can look at the pass rates.  Any program which doesn't have 80-90 pass rates and which is proud of not having 80-90 pass rates has some serious issues.

 * danger - The MIT undergraduate program is very dangerous. What happens is that there are a lot of "exposed gears" which can psychologically do very, very bad things.  The problem is that if a student reacts to pressure and stress by withdrawing, this causes a downward spiral whose results are not pretty.

 * scalability and flexibility - The basic problem is that as it currently exists the MIT degree does not scale and it is designed for full-time undergraduate students. This has subtle effects.  If you are 19, the MIT experience is useful to teach you how to deal with pressure and stress.  If you are 35, you've probably already learned how to deal with pressure and career related stress, and this isn't a useful part of the curriculum.

The other thing is that degree programs naturally attract very driven people, who are busy and stressed out of their minds.

The informal curriculum

 * No multiple choice tests - All evaluation should consist of hand graded individually graded assignments

 * No weed out classes

 * Encouragement of team work

Summer Internships
(Note: Can someone more familar with the NSF REU program put in more stuff in here. Also I'm interested to know how the REU programs handle students older than average.)

 * http://www.aas.org/career/Summer.html
 * http://www.yale.edu/yser/links/extramural.html
 * http://www.phds.org/graduate-school/undergraduate-research/
 * http://www.phds.org/graduate-school/undergraduate-research/summer-internships-2/
 * http://www.yale.edu/yser/links/extramural.html
 * NSF-funded REU Physics Programs

title: Physics Bachelor of Science


text:
Talk:Physics Bachelor of Science

BTW, since people tend to be concerned about credentials. I have a Bachelor in Science from MIT (class of 1991) and a Doctor in Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin (1998). When I say that I think it is possible to get a bachelor of science in physics degree through wikiversity (even if the actual degree is issued by someone else), I'm dead serious here.

All of the parts are out there. It's a matter of putting them together.

Roadrunner 07:26, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I've finished a BS in Physics just last June, so I can help check if the curriculum is up-to-date (though other than the availability of a few electives in advanced topics made accessible to undergrads I doubt the curriculum has changed that much for the past half century). --Yosofun 11:16, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
 * If you can post what you liked and what you didn't like about your bachelors that would be really useful. One of the interesting things about MIT is that undergraduate teaching is not a high priority, and so you have teachers that are incompetent.  However, none were institutionally sadistic the way I've seen in the physics department (although not the astronomy department) at UT Austin.  The fact that the teachers at MIT aren't that great at teaching is made of with the fact that you have very strong and supportive student peers and a great research environment.
 * Part of what I'm interested in is how physics may be taught very differently from school to school. I know that MIT and UT Austin Physics have very different learning cultures.  (And physics and astronomy at UT have radically different cultures) Roadrunner 01:24, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Thomas Edison State / Charter Oak / MIT?
What's with the choice of schools, here...? You're certainly not basing it on NRC rankings, right...? Anyway, imho, I'd suggest that you consult Berkeley and UCSD regarding physics curriculums - other than MIT and possibly UT, they are schools with the most undergrad physics majors. Also, UCSD has a variety of different specializations in addition to the traditional grad-school route, including Biophysics, Materials, Computational and Industry. --Yosofun 11:30, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

 * The choice of schools is based on the fact that I have first hand experience with the MIT and UT Austin physics degrees. The problem with basing it off UCSD, is since I didn't go to UCSD, I don't have any first hand experience as to how they teach physics. The main issue is that in my experience at MIT only a very, very small fraction of the curriculum is taught through the formal curriculum, and I have no idea what the informal curriculum is like at UCSD.  Roadrunner 03:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

 * Having tutored or corresponded with a couple hundred current or recently graduated physics majors from around the world (GREPhysics.NET), I'd say that there's a common formal curriculum in physics (at least in the past few years). Pretty much every single physics undergrad goes through the usual Mechanics/EM/QM/Thermo/SM and possibly programming in Mathematica or FORTRAN or math methods for formal curriculum. This, in my opinion, is the defining aspect of a physics undergraduate education. The informalities will vary from place to place, but every single physics major will share a common experience in having to deal with the formal curriculum and what it entails -- problem sets that vary from mindlessly easy to arduous to examinations that make one feel gyped for being too easy or foolish beyond comprehension for being so abstruse. However, the point is that whatever informality is derived from the formal curriculum, and that, nowadays, at least, it's rather like an invariant. (Having attended lectures in a couple of different schools and having gone incognito to take exams "for fun," I can also say that students tend to behave similarly everywhere, especially when an exam turns out to be a surprise to them.) That being said, I'd say you're worrying way too much about the informalities and psychological impacts, such as stuff like "brutality," as mentioned on the module page. Instead, you should check out how places like UCSD manages to preserve the conventional subjects of a physics major, while simultaneously managing to create "specializations" -- for example, UCSD has a "Physics BS with Specialization in Astrophysics" degree. Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

 * I'll get into more of this on the wiki, but my experience has been that very little of the "real" instruction (at least at MIT) actually takes place in the classroom. Most of it takes place in late-night social networks over incomprehensible problem sets.  The problem is that because these study sessions are in the middle of the night, they aren't being studied, and most of the undergraduates don't realize that that is were they are learning most of the material from.

 * I do come from a *very* different perspective (not necessarily better or worse just different) in that I graduated fifteen years ago, went through a Ph.D. graduate program and then ended up in "real life." The important thing in graduate school is not the formal curriculum, but that you picked up the "culture of physics." Also, my wife is working on her Ph.D. in early childhood education, and talking with her about her curriculum (she is a big fan of Vygotsky) made me see my undergraduate experience in a very different light.  On the other hand, I don't have a very broad range of experiences, and I really don't know anything about what physics is like for an undergraduate today (i.e. I didn't know anything about REU until you told me).

 * Brutality is a big concern because of my experience as a teaching assistant at University of Texas at Austin. One selection effect if you look at the people who took the physics GRE's is that you only see the people who somehow made it through the system, and not all of the people who got washed out as freshman and sophomores.  One of the nice things about MIT circa 1990, was that there was not this weed out system in place.  Personally, I thought that the weed-out system was disgusting.  Brutality was also a major issue in my own undergraduate education.

 * Roadrunner 13:44, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

 * Do you know for a fact that Charter Oak will accredit (for free)? I just checked their site; they're almost as bad as Devry, charging a grand just for an online (read: worthless) degree.

 * A regionally accreditted degree isn't worthless, it may not be what you need for a job, but it will let you put the degree down on your resume. Roadrunner 13:38, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
 * What's the point of it then--or, rather, how will it help your resume (and is there anything else it's good for)? Would backelors-degree-requiring grad schools even accept such a BS? Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
 * A regionally accreditted degree is one of the "must have" marks for admission to physics graduate schools, but getting Charter Oak to rubber stamp the degree will pass that criteria. The big thing that graduate schools look for is research experience, letters of recommendation, GRE scores, and these are more or less independent of what school you do to.  If you have those, then a degree from anywhere is sufficient to get you in the system.  (This is based on personal observation of how grad school committees behave.  Once there is some more meat on it, I can and will actually ask people on the grad school admission committees to evaluate the degree plan.)  Roadrunner 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Something that graduate committees do look for is personal initiative. OK, you didn't have to take this hard course, but did you do it anyway?  In some ways putting too many requirements defeats the purpose of the degree.  If everything is required, it's hard to tell if the student really has personal initiative.  Roadrunner 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

 * Charter Oak won't accredit for free. The goal of this is to create a degree that is free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer.  I don't think that it is possible to create a free as in beer degree, although a free as in speech degree should cause the costs to go way down. Roadrunner 03:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Not sure what the difference between the two are. Why would we need a free-as-in-in-speech physics degree? Are you proposing to offer the prospective students some sort of radically-revolutionalized remake of the current standard physics undergrad education? Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Absolutely. My ulterior motive is that a radically redone undergraduate education will create a demand for free lance tutors which gets me back into academia. Roadrunner 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

 * Might you consider working with other universities in accredation; perhaps even your alma mater MIT? I know as a fact that UCSD Sixth College is desperate for a decent Internet-org-affiliation; however, I would strongly advise that you work around the college's notorious liberal arts "core program" that is the usual requirement of their traditional degree. (Do not mention you heard it from me.) --Yosofun 11:41, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
 * If people from MIT and UCSD want to collaborate, they can edit the degree plan just like everyone else. I'm going to be travelling up to MIT to generate some interest in this, and I really want to go to Thomas Edison and Charter Oak since I don't have any direct experience in their bureaucracies.  However, I will simply refuse to sit in a committee meeting that spends months issuing a report that means nothing.  Life is too short and I have too much to do. 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

 * The trouble is that unless MIT is going to radically expand enrollments, this is going to be problematic. Roadrunner 03:31, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
 * You also have to realize that it does take some time (hmm) and a degree of effort (no pun intended) to achieve a physics degree. Even if a free-as-in-beer physics degree were offered, not all 7 billion people (or whatever number the world population is right now) will come flocking for this free degree. Most people will, as they'd like to put it, have better stuff to do. So, in the end, MIT will probably not end up radically expanding enrollment. Moreover, the point is not enrollment but accreditation, as in getting a degree. Only students who have completed the equally-arduous Wikiversity Physics curriculum would be of numerical matter to MIT... and like I mentioned earlier, only those who truly put in the time will get to complete this degree, and there won't be so many of them, so MIT won't even experience a big jump in the number of graduates. Other than a bit of administrative triviality, can you think of something that would be truly problematic with getting MIT to endorse this? Yosofun 01:31, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
 * MIT graduates about 70 physics students each year. There are *far* more than 70 physics students that would be interested in this.  The model that I have in the my head is that fifteen to twenty years from now, MIT will offer intensive two week courses/seminars/conferences for undergraduates from other universities, that open courseware will be packaged specifically for use by other universities, that the current on-campus population will turn into something akin to guinea pigs in a laboratory school, and that even they will get a fairly large fraction of their coursework from outside of MIT.  It's something that can be doable in small steps, with buy-in from small numbers of people at MIT.
 * Getting MIT to endorse this is less difficult than it might seem, there is a sense of crisis at MIT and a fear that it is going to be made obsolete by new technology. This leaves it far more open to new ideas than places that don't have this sense of crisis.  (And this remarkable openness to new thinking is one reason I love that place.) 14:10, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Penn State has their course requirements and descriptions online here, and the homepage of their online degree program here. I'm currently going through the 'weeding out' process as an Astrophysics major there. RyanJSuto 15:42, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

GRE Physics Prep
I created GREPhysics.NET last November in order to force myself to work through all the GRE Physics problems (it's a lot more fun if I have an audience to please), and to see if I can still create a complete CMS with LaTeX features in a weekend in the middle of midterms week. I've been meaning to write a GRE Physics textbooks (probably to-be-called The GRE Physics Textbook), whose the stable version will be hosted on GREPhysics.NET, and whose extended version I might crowdsource out in wiki somewhere. (However, since it is related to a very dog-eat-dog-exam, vandalism is quite suspect... so I'm not sure if that will be wise or prudent.) But, either way, that bit can also help with the grad-school prep of this Wikiversity project. --Yosofun 11:30, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

 * Post everything you have on the wiki. We can worry about editing it later.

 * Something that I think is the case is that the dog-eat-dog you are seeing is a consequence of how physics is taught. The interesting thing about MIT (as compared to UT Austin physics) is how little inter-student competition there was, and people were very supportive of each other.  This I think is directly related to the fact that MIT has no weed out classes (everyone has to take physics and the pass rate is >90%).  Because everyone is likely to pass, there is a lot of incentive for student to help each other, which is important since undergraduate teaching is a secondary priority for the faculty.

 * There are also small but important things like the fact that every single test and problem set at MIT is hand graded. Also all of the living groups had extensive libraries of "bibles" worked out problems from years past.  There was only one tiny multiple choice scanner and that was used for course evaluations.

 * I'm curious how physics is taught at a small liberal arts college.

Roadrunner 01:24, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Grad courses
I've taken a bunch of grad courses as an undergrad, and as you might guess, I'm interested in extending the Wikiversity BS to possibly a PhD? Lol... I can totally imagine myself emeritus at Oxford, with Wikiversity listed as my PhD school.... lmfao... that is, if i ever return to academia, again... hm. --Yosofun 11:30, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

 * As I mentioned elsewhere, in some ways it is easier to create an online Ph.D. in physics than it is to create a Bachelor degree. If you have five respected physicists on your committee and a very respected dissertation advisor willing to sign your dissertation, *NO ONE* in the physics community is going to care what school issues it.  (People outside the physics community might care, but that's a different story.) Roadrunner 03:35, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

 * Undergrads care quite a bit about where they go to grad school, but I admit I don't know the exact state of how tenured academia, in general, regards the place where one receives the Ph.D from -- though it is curious that on university webpages, the prof's tend to be listed with "name | phd school" and a photo and a brief list of recent papers. (Incidentally, that's one of the reasons why a site supplying solutions to released GRE Physics exams cannot be made into a wiki... the kids'd all attempt to fool each other into believing in a wrong solution in order to beat their peers on the exam day... wikiality at its worse.) My question is would you mind linking me to more information on how no one cares about which school issues your physics phd?

 * I don't know if there are any formal web pages on this, but this is direct experience in being part of the physics club. What matters is your advisor, dissertation committee, and publication record.  In the field of type II supernova research, University of Arizona and Florida Atlantic University are "big-name" schools because there happen to be faculty there who are very well regarded in the field.  If the faculty were to move, the prestige in the community would move with them.  People in supernova research tend to refer to people as being with "so-and-so's group" or "so-and-so's student" rather than the university.  Also, once you start publishing papers, then the reputation goes from the faculty to the school rather than the other way.

 * The "prof | Ph.D." tends to be very misleading because in the 1960's and 1970's, there was this massive expansion in science universities as people with Harvard degrees went to state schools in the West and then built programs, which were modelled after Harvard. These programs are now very competitive, but the Ph.D's they generate are going into industry.

 * I do understand the concern that undergraduates have because I went through the exact same thing. I basically thought that my academic career was over when I ended up at UTexas Austin instead of Harvard or MIT. It was, but Harvard and MIT Ph.D's are finding it only slightly easier to find faculty positions than UTexas Austin.

 * Roadrunner 13:27, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Lab courses?
A typical experimental physics lab course requires thousands of dollar's worth of equipment. (Of course, the hobo can always scavange in your local large university dumpster for the thousands of oscilloscopes they throw out daily... lol... actually I meant there's often a cheaper soluion -- in this case, skip the scope, just purchase the cables to hook it up to your computer) How exactly will physics lab courses be done -- again, partnership with local univerisities would be helpful? Perhaps the universities can be convinced of the benefit of either donating lab time to Wikiversity students or of some reciprocity relation? --Yosofun 12:04, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Thousands of dollars isn't that much money for an institution, and we can include instructions for a community college to be able to set up a physics lab, or having overnight courier ship in a experiment. Roadrunner 01:07, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

 * I think learning how to scrounge for parts, or at least set up a lab. I think a good part of experimental science or engineering is finding parts, putting them together, nad figuring out how to get something to work. While traditional universities may not teach this, it is vital if you want to do anything practical.

I don't know if this will help, but the website is an online group meeting scheduler that has built in features for enrolling in local meetings with like-minded groups. Myself, I'm part of the NYC Math Meetup group, which holds meetings at a bookstore in Union Square. If one can get local professors or labs to lend some time (or have participants pay to register time) to conducting a lab, this site can help organize those meetings. You really can't understand physics without hands-on lab work (actually doing physics). Ron 14:51, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Is Wikiversity free?
I think the answer is no. That would suck. Free is possible, but, a lot of connections'd have to be made. --Yosofun 12:07, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

 * My intention is to make the degree free as in speech. It probably won't be free as in beer, but I do think it will be a lot cheaper than tuition to MIT Roadrunner 03:38, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Even if it is free-as-in-speech, some sort of reciprocity relation with local universities will have to be worked out. The one thing that an online physics education won't get you (at least not easily) is lab experience (were this a degree in mathematics, we wouldn't be having this problem). Unless you want to give up the whole free-education-material idea in deference to the WV student lapsing out $ for lab equipment, Wikiversity will have to hook up with local universities to allow for lab experience.
 * It would be interesting to see how Open University does this. 14:11, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Isn't 'Free', in every sense, one of the basic foundations of WikiMedia? In Fact, I couldn't imagine such a site every charging money for anything such as education. This basic premise that education should be available to ALL, irrespective of monetary status. In fact, to utilize WikiMedia, one doesn't even need to own a computer, for they could utilize a public library. This philosophy is the beauty of it all. RyanJSuto 15:27, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

 * The trouble is that people have to eat. Things become very different once you have kids and have to have a job to support them.  24.206.109.229 05:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup?
To my mind, what would be nice here is: TimNelson 02:51, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
 * 1) Use of Degree planning templates; on this page, the Degree plan one, and the others used on subpages
 * 2) A fair amount of material on the main page actually seems to belong on the talk page

=Wikki Wonder= I find this "Degree Plan" quite interesting. I would be willing to enroll in this program. After all, there is only one way to determine if this idea can actually be a success.

64.252.35.167 02:11, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

 * The thing that I really need to get in contact with are people who are *already* studying physics through things like open university, TESC, or Charter Oak, since they would serve as a core student population to make this things work. I've been trying to get in touch with TESC, but haven't had much success.

24.206.109.229 05:27, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Wikiversity to grant accredited degrees?
Please join the discussion: Creation of Free Online University. The Jade Knight 03:20, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Side note: I have no need for a degree in Physics, but I'd be willing to be a guinea pig student for this program if the Department/School/Wikiversity could issue some sort of formal certificate of completion. I understand that that may be a long time coming. The Jade Knight 02:59, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

I'm willing to do some open course work and file my contributions hoping that sometime in the near future I can bring my work to an accredited university and gain degree credit. I don't know if these are reasonable goals or not, but it beats doing coursework and having nothing to show for it.RichMac 08:34, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

title: Talk:Physics Bachelor of Science


text:
Internet Publication

The Internet has revolutionized the way information flows in society. This course focuses on exploring the evolution of the Internet and how its structure democratizes the sources of knowledge. This is an attempt to fuse media theory, computer programming, and political science into a synthesis exploring the potential of the Internet and other technologies to make our public life more participatory, egalitarian, and liberated.

Projects

 * MediaWiki Project - guides participants from introductory HTML to developing MediaWiki features for the Wikiversity community.
 * Topic:MediaWiki - department of the School of Engineering and Technology for understanding and using MediaWiki software.
 * Wiki - learning project devoted to learning how to use wiki technology to facilitate online learning.
 * Free online peer reviewed journals - directory of Free online peer reviewed journals
 * Bibliography and Research Methods - find out how to properly obtain sources for Wikiversity to properly and successfully conduct research
 * Publishing original research

Readings

 * Open Source
 * Wiki Science

Links

 * Freenet
 * Electronic Frontier Foundation

title: Internet Publication


text:
Media Analysis

Course Description
Is our media biased? Who controls content on television, radio, newpapers, magazines, websites. What aims or ulterior motives can the owners of a media outlet have?

Readings
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky

The Media Monopoly: Ben Bagdikian

Projects
Research the following companies and report:

National Amusements owner of Viacom and CBS
 * Viacom's Assets
 * CBS Assets

General Electric owner of NBC
 * GE Assets

News Corporation owner of FOX
 * News Corporation Holdings

The Walt Disney Company
 * Disney Media Holdings

Time Warner owner of Time Magazine, AOL, CNN
 * Time Warner Assets

The Outside World

 * The Independent Media Center
 * Adbusters

title: Media Analysis


text:
Template:WikiversityActivities

teaching - learning -  discussing -  creating - thinking

title: Template:WikiversityActivities


text: Template:Wikiversity

title: Template:Wikiversity


text:
Template:Ed

[ ] For small edit links to a template :
 * Template:Ed results in  or
 *  set by MediaWiki:Edit (naive I18N),
 * use {{ lcfirst:{{ed | }}  }} for lowercase.
 * Template:Edi results in or +/-

Other languages:

title: Template:Ed


text:
Wikiversity:Accreditation

Accreditation is the process by which institutions of higher education are evaluated and qualified as such. There are various bodies that accredit universities in the United States. Wikiversity does not confer academically accredited degrees, diplomas, certificates, titles, etc. The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has directed the Wikiversity community away from accreditation. See the feedback from the Board on the original Wikiversity project proposal.

External link

 * July 2008 A model for accreditation with Wikiversity

title: Wikiversity:Accreditation


text:
Wikiversity:Creating a university

Lets think this through, what do you need to create an institution which is competitive with the Ivy League schools (Harvard, Yale) yet scalable to reach hundreds of millions of people?

You need to talk money, power, and social networks. Money and power are all based on social networks, and wikis create social networks.

The basic model. The medical doctor model. Professors setting up private practice to teach with wikiversity being the social glue to make this work.

What do you need for a world class university?

 * Alumni networks. They get you the money, power, and credibility
 * Career services. They help from the alumni networks.
 * Student advising and counseling.
 * Professional interaction. Notices of conferences.  Getting hooked up with co-authors.
 * Fundraising and development.

Who are the gatekeepers? Professional societies and peer-reviewed journals.

What does an independent professor need? Notices of conferences. Interaction with other people in the research community. People do handle the annoying administrative bits (recordkeeping, grants administration). Social support network (people offering sympathy at trying to balance career and family, feedback)

Note. People who are interested in academia are not looking to make huge amounts of money. If you can create a system by which an independent scholar can live a reasonable upper middle class lifestyle, you've already got a cadre of teachers. Look at the number of people who are willing to get paid peanuts as adjunct faculty at community colleges and UoP. There is a *vast* community of people at the margins of the system that can be mobilitized.

The type of information that would be useful for creating a world class research/teaching institution:

1) How do I raise money? Talk about how to prepare grants.  Career advice.  Networking. 2) What do I study? There is no reason for Wikiversity to reinvent the wheel. There are already a number of ways people can convert learning into accredited degrees. There just needs to be a forum for people to be able to share information on how to do this. 3) Feedback for professional academics. Pre-peer review.  When is the next conference on X?  What jobs are available.

What the Wikimedia Foundation can provide.

a) Grant support. WF is already going to have to have an infrastructure for getting and accounting for grants.  It can "open architect" that infrastructure to allow independent academics apply for grant money with WF as custodian. b) Matchmaking services. Match co-authors. Match people to conferences

Apply the open source development model to academic research and scholarship.

title: Wikiversity:Creating a university


text:
Unschooling

Resource description
Unschooling is an educational philosophy and practice that considers traditional schooling as possibly detrimental to a person's education. Unschooling is usually classified as a subcategory of homeschooling that does not use a fixed curriculum. Without any curriculum dictating a student’s learning path, the child is free to explore what he or she finds naturally interesting.

See Unschooling.

Readings

 * Deschooling our Lives ed. Matt Hern
 * Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
 * The Teenage Liberation Handbook by Grace Llewelyn
 * Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto
 * The Underground History of Public Education by John Taylor Gatto
 * Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto
 * Savage Inequalities by Jonathon Kozol
 * Free Schools by Jonathon Kozol
 * Teach Your Own by John Holt
 * Networked Learning
 * School is a prison -- and damaging our kids, Peter Gray, Salon, Aug 26, 2013
 * "Longer school years aren't the answer. The problem is school itself. Compulsory teach-and-test simply doesn't work."

 * Unschooling, the case for setting your kids into the wild, Ben Hewitt, Outside, August 12, 2014
 * "We Don't Need No Education, at least not of the traditional, compulsory, watch-the-clock-until-the-bell-rings kind. As a growing movement of unschoolers believe, a steady diet of standardized testing and indoor inactivity is choking the creativity right out of our kids. The alternative: set 'em free."

Projects

 * Homeschooling will begin an index of resources for parents who practice homeschooling.
 * Learning by failing

title: Unschooling


text:
Wikiversity:Who are Wikiversity participants?

There are many roles, or ways of participating, in Wikiversity—indeed, it is possible to have multiple roles. This page is to document and explore these roles.

Anyone can contribute to Wikiversity. You can click the register button to join up and start helping out. You can even edit pages without being a registered user!

Volunteers
Wikiversity is written, edited, and staffed by volunteers. Anyone is capable of editing a page, but some people in particular devote a portion of their time to editing and maintaining Wikiversity, all these individuals are volunteers. Wikiversity owes its existence to these volunteers, and thanks the most vigilant by giving them custodianship, or sysop privileges.

Newcomers and experienced participants
Experienced users are supposed to do their best to "not bite newcomers". That is, sometimes experienced users forget what it is like to be new to Wikimedia projects and can sometimes be less sensitive than appropriate in helping newcomers to become aware of best practices that contribute to the best possible quality of the projects. So please be bold, and forge your own path!

Learners / Students
Primarily here to learn. Can access learning materials, and join existing learning projects or form new ones.

Mentors / Teachers
Primarily here to teach. Can write learning materials, assist learners, and mentor students.

Researchers
Engaged in gathering, analyzing, and presenting new information and knowledge.

Editors
Modifying and improving the content, presentation, precision, sourcing, etc. of others work. Interestingly, any effective feedback to resource creators shifts this role towards embracing aspects of the instructor and/or learning theorist. This is true without further specific participation of the editor should the originator of the material learn anything from a different comparison of the original to the edited version.

Custodians
Sometimes called "admins" or "sysops" on other projects, custodians have some extra tools to facilitate maintenance work on Wikiversity, including deleting pages, and blocking people who vandalise Wikiversity or engage in destructive activity.

Curators
Curators have some extra tools to manage content on Wikiversity, including moving and deleting pages and rolling back vandalism.

"Gardeners"
Quite a lot of wiki work is in linking pages, creating structuring resources (such as navigation templates), adding categories, etc. in order to aid others in their navigation of Wikiversity. This is sometimes called "gardening" to indicate the "hidden" jobs that make the whole thing (i.e. wiki/garden) work and look better. Most of this work does not require custodian tools.

Community builders
Welcoming new participants, pointing people in appropriate directions, creating, developing, and sustaining community spaces (have a peek at Category:Wikiversity)

Learning theorists
Discussing how learning works on Wikiversity, and helping orientate learning projects and resources around pedagogical theories and practice.

Facilitators
Help things happen—pointing people to appropriate pages or people, asking questions, raising suggestions, etc.

Mediators
Help ease conflicts, or move them from destructive towards productive conflict.

Catalysts
Catalysts are "movers and shakers" who work as custodians but don't want or need the sysop tools.

Other roles
Please add further roles here as they arise.

User pages
Many people detail some of their interests and/or activities on their user pages. This can be a way of getting to know someone, or to give some information about yourself that might spark some learning activity. Further info at Help:User page


text:
Psychiatric Liberation

Course Description
Exploring the issues surrounding the treatment of the "mentally ill" in institutions and our wider society. Particularly the issues of forced treatment, pharmaceutical drugs, and stigmatization of the mentally ill.

Wikipedia articles

 * Liberation psychology
 * Anti-psychiatry
 * Outline of the psychiatric survivors movement

Syllabus

 * /Language and "Mental Illness"/
 * /History of Psychiatric Institutionalization/
 * /Psychopharmaceutical drugs and herbal remedies/
 * /Shamanism and Psychosis/
 * /Social constructions of mental illness/
 * /Stigma/

The Outside World

 * Freedom Center
 * The Icarus Project
 * Support Coalition International

title: Psychiatric Liberation


text:
Neurochemical Liberation

Course Description
"Let us declare nature to be legitimate. All plants should be declared legal, and all animals for that matter. The notion of illegal plants and animals is obnoxious and ridiculous."

-Terence McKenna

Readings
Neuroscience

Controlled Substances Act

Pharmako/Poeia by Dale Pendell ISBN 1562790692

Pharmako/Dynamis by Dale Pendell ISBN 1562791257

Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story by Alexander and Ann Shulgin ISBN 0963009605

Tihkal: The Continuation by Alexander and Ann Shulgin ISBN 0963009699

Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers by Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hoffman, and Christian Ratsch ISBN 0892819790

Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess And How We Can Get Out Of It by Mike Gray ISBN 0415926475

Syllabus

 * /Neurochemistry Basics/
 * /Action Potential/
 * /The Synapse/
 * /Receptors/
 * /Neurotransmission/
 * /Dopamine/
 * /Gamma Amino Butyric Acid/
 * /Serotonin/
 * /Glutamate/
 * /Adenosine/

The Outside World

 * Erowid
 * Drug Policy Alliance
 * Drug Reform Coordination Network
 * Bluelight Drug Discussion Forums
 * Wikipedia

title: Neurochemical Liberation


text:
Freelance academics

Fasil.pc 17:21, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Getting connected
[https://twp2.blogspot.com/?m=0 One of the more important things in doing academics is getting connected. These can provide a lot of professional support as well as personal support.]

Online resources
Here are some locations for online networks

 * http://www.chronicle.com/
 * http://www.adjunctnation.com/
 * http://www.ncis.org/

Joining organisations and societies
This is a good idea, improving the likelihood of being able to attend conferences and talks (in terms of cost and some being open to members only). It also allows networking with people working in the field in a professional capacity.

Attending seminars and talks
Many university departments hold lunchtime seminars with an invited speaker - they are in my experience not strictly policed in terms of who is let in and allowed to debate. Talks may be put on by various societies and organisations which can be informative and allow networking.

This is a guide for people trying to do research and scholarship outside the traditional academic system. I'm using this to document my own efforts at doing this, and look forward to insights from people looking to do the same thing.

Roadrunner 16:16, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Why this document is necessary
This document is necessary because there are a lot of talented people out there in community colleges and industry, who really, really would like to do academic research. The purpose of this page is to create a support network and to provide the best information available.

Time management
As you know there are a lot of things to do for you.
 * Check out what has most priority for you at the moment.
 * Plan your day.
 * Never forget to take time to change your activity regulary, even during the day.
 * Take time to read books about these themes.
 * Good tools and knowledge will always help you to improve.
 * Communicate about what you are doing. Maybe you get good hints.

Your day job
The hard part in being a freelance academic is not the money, it is getting time and social networks. Companies are not used to giving people time off to pursue their interests. ***Time*** is the hardest thing that you need from your day job.

One strategy which works in small companies is to become important enough to operations and then negotiate some time off each month. For bigger companies this is much harder since they generally have more inflexible human resources rules.

One thing that you will need to do very careful is to *read the fine print in any non-disclosure agreement* you may be asked to sign to make sure that you are not signing away any intellectual properties rights.

It is also useful to have a day job that has nothing to do with your academic interest. If your day job involves mechanical engineering, it is much easier to convince an employer not to assert claims against discoveries in biology than if your employer is actually doing biological work.

Examples of day jobs
Executives in Sales /marketing, Accounts executives, HR /Personnel Executives

Janitors
I've known people who have done this. The good thing about being a janitor is that its actually rather low-stress work with fixed defined hours. You don't end up interacting with people that often. The big problem is that the pay isn't very good, which isn't an issue if you are single and on your own, but it is a problem if you have a family to support.

Adjunct community college faculty
This can be an effective solution in some instances but one must usually have at least a masters degree to teach here. There are exceptions, however, and it is possible for some to get jobs as adjunct faculty at a community college teaching several different subjects in which they have provable knowledge. The average pay is around $750 per credit hour which means that an adjunct faculty member would make about $2,250 for teaching 3 hours per week for an entire semester. While this may seem excellent, the average course load that a part-time adjunct faculty member can expect to get is around $6,750 per semester, or less that $14,000 per year. This means that teaching part time is usually not a viable option for all income, though it can help supplement income. Payment is per credit-hour taught and the professor can expect to easily work twice this amount preparing lesson plans, holding office hours, and doing other activities that are necessary such as grading homework and papers.

Research Mentoring Program
Wikiversity's Research Mentoring Program provides mentoring resources for freelance academics, including a place where freelance academics can sign up to be mentors themselves. It also offers research certification.

Library services
The easiest way of getting library services is having a friend or spouse that has access to a university library.

For a fee, most university libraries will give you access to their collections. These programmes are usually called something like "research readerships." They often do not offer full access, I've had to combine my research readership at U of Toronto with help from active students there, but overall, the experience has been wonderful.

(need some other options)

Also with the advent of book stores like half.com and amazon.com, these are also available as de-facto libraries.

Most public libraries participate in inter-library loaning networks. One can get almost any book or journal article through this channel in a week or two, often for free. All that is required is that you furnish accurate citations for what you seek and that you return the materials when due.

Public librarians are often eager to help freelance researchers in other ways, so it pays to develop positive relationships with them.

Cold calling
There is also a technique in e-mailing people to get professional contacts. In writing these e-mails, the important rule is that you have to show the person that you are contacting that you provide as much benefit to them as you are getting.

A very useful approach is to simply ask a question about a paper that the person you are e-mailing has done. For example it may be helpful to have a few questions for the person and generate them before you send e-mail or call them. It may also be helpful if you write or publish a newsletter whether online or off-line and are able to conduct an interview with that person. This can further increase your chances of connecting with them and conducting freelance academic research.

Follow the golden rule
If you start getting internet visibility, you will at some point start getting e-mail from people junior than you asking for advice and help. Treat those e-mails in exactly the same way that you want your e-mails to someone more senior to be treated.

Also, people asking for advice can often have some very useful contacts and information.

Carry a book around
Something that is surprisingly useful is to carry a book around about what you are studying. If you have a book on particle physics, this is a billboard saying that you are interested in particle physics, and you might attract the attention of the particle physicist that is sitting next to you on the airplane.

Links

 * http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/08/2006081401c/careers.html
 * http://chronicle.com/jobs/sidecol_library/nonacademic.htm

title: Freelance academics