Education/Wikipedia Education Collaborative/Projects

The purpose of this page is to discuss some ongoing questions about the education campaign that is currently in the works. The goal of this global campaign is to engage teachers in using Wikimedia Projects in their lessons, namely Wikipedia. We want to challenge the traditional definition of education by telling teachers that “learning is editing,” keeping in mind that the definition of an “edit” on Wikipedia is not limited to editing text on a page—it can also mean adding images and references, translating, or creating content.

Portal

Events and Opportunities

Through a series of lesson plans, the skills that students will learn are lasting: not only will they gain the technical knowledge of learning how to edit a page, they will also learn the values of collaborating with others, using in the free licenses, culture and practicing the values of the Wikimedia movement’s culture.

The Education Collaborative will be a key partner in this campaign. Working with the Collaborative, we hope that we can train students to contribute valuable knowledge to Wikimedia projects and maybe also become lifelong Wikipedians.Through this campaign, we aim to advance the idea of digital literacy in education and strengthen the connections of our international community.

Decisions made

The campaign will last 4 weeks.
The campaign will pilot around late August to late September, in conjunction with the start of the school year in many places around the world and International Literacy Day (September 8).
Suggested timeline: September 1 - September 30.
Outreach channels will include Twitter, Facebook, a site notice banner, and education blogs.

Ongoing tasks

We look forward to having the campaign content translated into all the languages represented in the Education Collaborative.

Things to discuss

1. Campaign name and hashtag

The name is the biggest label for the campaign and what people will first see when they hear about it. It is the broadest, most forward representation of the campaign.

Here are some things to keep in mind when thinking about the campaign name:

The campaign name should be easily translatable and understood worldwide.
The campaign hashtag will be the same worldwide and cannot be translated.
The name of the campaign will inform the hashtag we use and the name of the page.

Current options:

EduWiki
WikiTeachIn
TeachWithWiki
Wiki4Teaching
… (your suggestion here)

2. Contest approach

During the most recent campaign meeting, Shani brought up the idea of centering the campaign around the idea of a contest. Students could compete to see who can make the most edits.

This leads to the following questions:

Should we refocus the campaign to revolve around a contest approach?
If so:
- Who would the students be competing against? (e.g. their classmates, other classes, other countries)

3. Number of assignments

Currently, we have drafted lesson plans for four assignments, which you can view here. These four assignments have four different foci:

Citations (References & Resources)
Creating/Editing Content
Images
Translation

The number of assignments is a key part of the message of our campaign, and will define the call to action. During the most recent Collab meeting, some people thought we should keep the number of assignments to four in order to cater to as many teachers as possible, while others thought it would be better to narrow the focus of the campaign by having less assignments.

We also don’t know in which classes teachers may be using our lesson plans.

This leads to the following questions:

Should we keep the number of assignments to four?
If we focus only on one assignment:
- Do we all agree to make one assignment out of lesson plans 1 and 2 (Citations and Editing content on Wikipedia)?
- Should we still leave the other assignments as optional on the campaign site?

4. Channels

Our current plans for channels are to post to Twitter, Facebook, and education blogs. Additionally, we would like to have a site notice banner on Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects). However, we understand that there are many education blogs that vary in popularity by country.

This leads to the following questions:

Should the site notice banner be visible to only registered users, or for all users?
What are the top three education blogs in your country that we could guest blog in?