Education/News/March 2021/A Wikipedia Webinar for Indonesian Women Teachers

A Wikipedia Webinar for Indonesian Women Teachers

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Twitter: @wikimediaid, Facebook: @wikimedia.indonesia, Instagram: @wikimediaid, Website: wikimedia.or.id

Summary: Wikimedia Indonesia and Teachers Association of the Republic of Indonesia organized a webinar to celebrate the International Women’s Day.

Digital poster for social media to promote the event.

Happy International Women's Day!

This month (March) is the time for the whole world to commemorate International Women's Day that’s celebrated annually on the 8th of March. A lot of events and activities have been organized to celebrate International Women’s Day. The Teachers Association of the Republic of Indonesia (PGRI) was also motivated to participate in this celebration. PGRI, through Catur Nurrochman Oktavian, contacted Wikimedia Indonesia to collaborate in a webinar about digital literacy which was aimed specifically at women teachers throughout Indonesia.

Catur is the Head of the Department of Research and Community Service at PGRI and is also a Wikimedia Indonesia volunteer who has conducted many Wikipedia training for teachers in several regions in Indonesia. In this webinar, Catur took the role of the presenter who would present the materials on the introduction to Wikipedia to the participants with the support of the Wikimedia Indonesia Education team.

This webinar activity is also a part of Wiki Women’s Month initiated by Wikimedia Indonesia as a form of celebration of International Women's Day. The webinar had the theme of “Women in Leadership: Achieving An Equal Future in A COVID-19 World”. The significance of the webinar is to encourage the participants, especially the female teachers to take part in the use of technology in order to participate in the democratization of knowledge especially during this changing period amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This event was carried out online, on March 6, 2021, through Zoom, and was attended by approximately 300 teachers (most of them were female) from various regions across Indonesia.

The event was opened by the Chairman of PGRI, Prof. Dr. Unifah Rosyidi, M.Pd. who stated that technology had changed the way knowledge was spread. Therefore, digital literacy has become a basic knowledge that must be mastered by everyone, especially the educators, so that they could engage in the deeper global conversation, which was quoted from her as “reaching for the unreached”. For that reason, this collaboration to improve digital literacy for the teachers is a proper step taken by both sides.

In this event, the participants were introduced to Wikipedia. Some participants had even managed to create accounts, and fill in their user pages on Indonesian Wikipedia. Some of them had also participated actively during the interactive session of this event, and some others have shown a basic understanding of some general rules of writing on Wikipedia, such as references that can and cannot be used on Wikipedia, and how to paraphrase an article in an encyclopedic style.

At the end of the event, several participants who actively participated in this event received souvenirs from Wikimedia Indonesia and PGRI that would be sent to their addresses. PGRI hoped that this event could be a good beginning to encourage the participants and to engage more educators to get involved in the process of contributing to Wikipedia.

To learn more about this program, please contact Amy at rahmi.nailahwikimedia.or.id.