Education/About/Office Hours/August 31 2018

Ask me & Tell me Anything

hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team

Friday, August 31, 16:00 UTC

Agenda

Which topic would you like to share/discuss/ask about? Add your suggestions here:

Participants:

• Vahid (WMF)
• Mehrdad (Freelance)
• Sailesh (WMF)
• Nichole (WMF)
• Galib (WM Bangladesh)

Minutes of the meeting:

• Galib: Creating a global policy for Wikimedia Education Program
  • There are a variety of activities around the world, diverse contexts. Support best practices that each volunteer can adapt on in their local contexts. Working locally is the global program.
  • Global recognition is a need. Venues for that are: Programs Showcase (in September), the Education Newsletter, and Office Hours to help with sharing.
  • This is a new direction that follows https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/01/23/education-survey-report/

• Sailesh: Mapping exercise
  • centralized document that shows the diversity of education programs
  • will be presented on September 4th
  • CIS, as an affiliate can help other initiatives by providing knowledge and documents that

• Mehrdad: experience from Afghanistan
  • high levels of illiteracy
  • education models have been copied from other countries, with no contextualization
  • many Wikimedia Projects could fit with those neeeds
  • it would help with critical thinking
  • people have phones (not computers)
  • Dari versus Farsi (languages reflect identities/politics)
  • contributions could be made in Dari
  • Thailand: blocked pages (especially the King's page)
  • Turkey: Wikipedia blocked
  • Sustainable Development Goals: 17a
  • offer Wikimedia projects to agencias that work on those goals
  • There's a volunteer that has endeavored to promote the Wikimedia Projects in Afghanistan, but political interference makes it difficult.
  • Security is a larger challenge than even politics in Afghanistan
  • American University of Afghanistan works hard
  • Training people outside of Afghanistan could be a solution
  • Support communities and what they choose to do. Work with partners is ok, but has to connect to local communities.
  • Pashto community: there seems to be poeple contributing (possibly from the diaspora)
  • How is Internet access?
  • 3G is available almost everywhere
  • Analytical/critical engagement with knowledge is fairly low
  • Wikifundi: Offline editing of Wikipedia
  • Creating a program in Afghanistan (focused on a local language) could be an incubation project.

• Nichole: Education incubation project
  • project will offer training modules on topics such as project management, basic accounting, evaluation, ...
  • Applications will be open soon

• • Nichole: New Readers team at WMF
  • Focus: how to read information critically
  • this is a global need
  • a package will be published next year

• Galib: videos on youtube about Wikimedia and education
  • creating more videos would be useful
  • there are a lot of videos that have been created by local communities. The Education Team at WMF have to do a better job of curating those resources.

• Mehrdad: looking at the 3 top priorities, does this mean these are all efforts that come from the community
  • efforts are made by the wiki-ecosystem that includes volunteers, Affiliates, communities, and the educators