Education/Newsletter/July 2015/Wikimania 2015: education highlights

By Samir Elsharbaty (WMF)

 
One of the Education sessions where 14 participants from 14 different countries talked about their programs.
 
WMF's education team was at the community engagement booth to answer community questions about the program.
 
Group photo for some of the attendees of the Wikimania Education Pre-Conference

Snippet: Wikimania 2015 was a good space for education program experts to share their experiences, for community members to discuss, and for newbies to discover how it works.

The education activity at Wikimania 2015 started before the main conference as an Education Pre-Conference was held this year. The Education Pre-Conference was a two-day event aimed both at educators interested in starting an education program in their institution, and at more experienced program leaders who were eager to learn from other people’s experiences and share their own good practices around using Wikipedia in education. The workshops, discussions and learning sessions were organized and run by program experts from around the world and attended by nearly 60 participants who varied from Wikipedians to educators or students.

The beginning of Wikimania brought more action as there were 11 education-related sessions among the different sessions of the three-day conference. Attendees were able to discover the relationship between Wikipedia and education through the eyes of the speakers who covered different topics including engaging students in new and innovative activities, practical sessions on how to build partnerships and how to communicate your program and others on the involvement of different generations in Wikipedia editing and many more.

When the first day of the conference was over, there was more time to meet the people with whom you work virtually on growing Wikipedia through the classroom assignments. The education meetup was held to continue building the personal connections that improve sharing of experiences and to talk about the future of their programs.

If you have been to Wikimania without wandering in the community village, you have missed a lot. It is the place where programs and countries are represented and where you can taste the sweets of South Africa, read about projects happening in China and meet Wikipedia Education Program representatives at the Community Engagement booth to answer any questions you have and learn about our available resources.

See more photos from the education activities happened at Wikimania 2015 here.

Browse the slides from the conference education sessions here.

Find the notes of the Wikimania Education Pre-Conference here.