Wikimedia Conference 2011/Documentation/Working Groups: Education

Workshop: Education

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Present people

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

Issues

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  • 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?

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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