Wikimedia Conference 2011/Documentation/Working Groups: Education

Workshop: Education

Present people

Patricio, Jerry Yuyu, Kiril Simeonovski, Marianah, L. Oscar, Teele Yaalma, Liron Dorfman, James Heilman, Andrew Owens, Filip M., Siebrand M., Cornelius, Gábor

Issues

Which role does the Wikimedia movement have in the education world?
How can we cooperate with educational institutions?
trying to get an overview on which things are possible here

Discussion: Which projects do you know?

Starting a scholarship / scholarship-competition
Serbia has a cooperation with some faculties at the universtiy (5th faculty they have experience with: students write articles, professors support them): that is a benefit for students as well.
- in some cases it is only rough material and has to be improved
- in some cases they can also put that to Wikipedia in the right way
Hongkong: Teachers use material from Wikipedia but they don't know how to use it in fact.
- Outreach: Give them examples how to teach with Wikipedia and expleain the material
- local university researcher
Argentinia: Most of the teachers don't know how to deal with Wikipedia and how to deal with the internet in general. → Best practices of how to use Wikipedia/Wikimedia-resources in the lesson / in school – Workgroups for teachers and professors
Israel: Joined an organization to support pupils 6th and 7th grade how to use wikipedia, because it is important for them
Another project from Israel: Graphic design college: Find „free fonts“
more university-projects

Issues

Problem: Students are not allowed to use Wikipedia for their homework
- Teacher problem: Younger and older teachers are open for Wikimedia-projects and the new media, there is a gap between these groups
- older professors and younger professors are interested in using Wikipedia:
Question: How is the understanding of Wikipedia in the educational world?
- Hongkong: The students use it as reference and don't care about it. The teachers have no time to care about that problem as well. In other regions teachers banned Wikipedia
- try to find creative educational uses of Wikipedia: e. g. in a workshop: “Don't trust Wikipedia“!. Tell the teachers
Different approaches: People improve the Wikipedia or we improve how people handle with wikipedia.
Issue: When we tell them: Don't trust the Wikipedia → can that have a disturbing impact on Wikipedia?
- The information must be: “Don't stake your life on Wikipedia!“
Hongkong: “The smart use of Wikipedia“d
Different approaches: When we talk about Wikisource and about Commons we want to help the students to uses; when we talk about Wikipedia, we want du persuade the students to give free content to us.
We can tell the people that there not only mistakes in Wikipedia but also in printed encyclopedia
Issues:
1. We are not sure about which projects can be done (there are very different ways of doing that).
2. Criticism of Wikipedia: You have to use different sources than only Wikipedia, you wouldn't ohny use one book either.

Concrete projects and measures

Question: What can we do as chapters? Concrete measures! (output)
1. What is the issue?
2. Look at the education system and talk to the people in the industry – management process with “stakeholders“?
One of the biggest problems is that people are informed too little and that prohibits teachers or professors from making projects with Wikimedia-projects: We need some guidelines or something where there can lern how to do that and where to go.
Problem: We all like the projects; we have to declare that we have checked Wikipedia
“Wikipedia in the classroom“ in WMAR: What teachers can and what they can't do with pupils.

Different material

Universities: Want to put their open education / teaching material to students online, but Wikipedia is not the right project for that, they don't want to do it really open, they want to keep ownership
Approach: Support Wikipedia by creating wikipedia-related content.
- Sometimes this wikis doesn't backfire
- Liquid threads are sometimes better to use