Education/Countries/Argentina/On site training with the Universidad de Rio Negro

Universidad Nacional de Río Negro 2016: teachers and university researchers as creators of educational proposals on Wikipedia

Introduction

During May 30th and 31st and June 1st, Wikimedia Argentina carried out training and editing activities at Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, located in General Roca. The proposal involved three encounters with students, graduates, teachers and researchers in paleontology, anthropology, translation and middle school teaching.

History

During the first encounter (Monday, May 30th), we generated an open debate and sensitization space about Wikimedia and its projects, where a great number of the educational community of General Roca participated. The invitation reached middle school teachers of the same town as well. The following 2 days (Tuesday, May 31st and Wednesday, June 1st) we engaged in workshops with 20 participants. In total we carried out three workshops that involved presenting the characteristics of the editing/participation on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons’ use. The editing involved subjects proposed by the participants. New articles related to specific teaching researches were created and pre-existing Wikipedia articles were improved. This magnified the content with a large quantity of primary sources and pictures created by the participants. As a closure to the activity, a Wikiproject was created: Patagonia Norte. It centralized the activities held during the three editing workshops and meant to be a space of belonging for the users, created by the activity. It also served as a way to keep encouraging interdisciplinary work among the subjects of the courses, while using Wikipedia as another tool to design and evaluate contents in a collaborative and free manner.

“	“The activity was fruitful in that all of those who attended, began the workshops without knowing how to create or edit contents on Wikimedia and ended the workshop having created or edited articles. The opening lecture sparked interest among the educative community. The three encounters carried out as workshops, gave the participants the tools and necessary criteria to become wikipedists and better yet, the instructors (Anna and Luisina) passed on a lot of enthusiasm which crystallized later on a wikiproject. We hope to add another step to this successful experience if we get every participant to replicate these acquired capacities at their institutions”. Fernando Archuby (Teacher and participant).	”

During the two days of training, teachers worked through different stages, as follows:

1. Sensitization workshops: the workshop presented the basics of Wikimedia and its projects. We went deeply into Wikipedia’s main characteristics as an educational tool.
2. Editing workshops: during the workshop, teachers learned to edit on Wikipedia and how to incorporate editing within the classroom as an assessment method.
3. Images workshop: through this workshop teachers learned about free culture and the use of images on their teaching productions. The workshop based its explanatory logic through the use of Wikimedia Commons.

The proposal’s objectives for teachers were the following:

1. Teachers’ appropriation of the proposal: teachers are the main articulators of the classroom proposals. Getting to acknowledge Wikipedia as a searching source and as a content creator source is the base to reflect upon teaching practices.
2. Wikipedia as a resource: teachers were unaware that Wikipedia could be used as a teaching resource. Although it was frequent to find users and active Wikimedia consumers among teachers, the workshops and training gave them new tools to use Wikipedia and the rest of the Wikimedia projects within the classroom.
3. Teachers as producers: education public policies are always a reality because teachers take them and apply them in the classroom. Teachers are the protagonists when articulating and contextualizing the knowledge their students obtain. In this sense, we promoted the creation of an interdisciplinary editing project that included the activities teachers carried out during training workshops, with the objective of contributing to the proposals acknowledgment and a higher commitment by the teaching community of the Universidad Nacional de Río Negro.

Learning

This activity has been a learning experience on how to work and train teachers. You can find the learning pattern here

Outocomes

Metrics	Workshops outcomes	Post-workshop outcomes
Newly registered	28	28
Number of female participants	21	n/a
Number of participants	28	19
Number of volunteers involved	1	1
Post-event projects	n/a	Wikiproyecto:Patagonia Norte
% gender parity	75%	n/a
Number of final participants/registered	97%	67%
Number of articles created	n/a	3
Número de artículos mejorados	31	29
Number of articles created and improved under WMAR’s quality ratio	29	n/a
Number of WMAR’s staff involved	2	n/a