Wikipedia Education Program/Education Program Leaders Workshop 2013

See the notes from the meeting.

Are you running an Education Program in your country? Do you want to start working with instructors and students to improve Wikipedia? Are you interested in helping to shape a global community of program leaders to grow Wikipedia's use in education worldwide? Are you planning to attend the Wikimedia Chapters Meeting in Milan, Italy, in April 2013?

Wikipedia in Education meeting at Wikimania 2012, a precursor to this workshop!

If so, please join us for the first Education Program Leaders Workshop, aimed at building a global community to share learnings and help each other overcome challenges. The workshop is open to any program leader already running a Wikipedia education program or who are interested in starting a Wikipedia education program. In the interest of keeping the meeting to a manageable number of people, we would prefer to keep each country's representation to no more than two people.

Rather than focusing on best practices within the program (e.g., should students work in sandboxes, what is the best way to monitor student activity, etc.), this workshop will focus on the big questions: How do we scale education programs? What is our strategy? How do we measure success? How can we get better about communicating with each other and sharing learnings across geographies, so we do not reinvent the wheel in each country? These are a few things we have thought about, but we also want to know what you want to accomplish at the meeting.

Unfortunately, the Wikimedia Foundation is unable to offer any financial assistance toward travel. While we know this sadly limits the number of people who can attend in person, we are looking at the possibility of having some people join us virtually.

  • Who: Education program leaders around the world
  • What: Workshop to share knowledge and develop a global community of education program leaders
  • When: Thursday, April 18, 9:00–17:00 local time (7:00–15:00 UTC)
  • Where: Milan, Italy: Hotel Grand Visconti Palace, Room Porta Magenta 1+2
    • When you enter the hotel, walk to the right past the front desk, past the bar, and take the elevators on your right down to floor -1. Walk down the hall to the right; the room will be on your right.

More information about the location, venue, etc. can be found on the Wikimedia Conference 2013 page on Meta. Questions about visas or other travel issues should be directed to Wikimedia Italia via that page.

Agenda

Our goal here is to have the majority of the day be facilitated discussions—so no presentations, just us sharing, learning, and deciding as a group.

9:00–10:30: Introductions

Everyone has 5 minutes to talk about your program, including:

  • Your name and what your role in the program is
  • What stage is your program in (just starting, a few terms' experience, etc.)?
  • What does your general structure look like (do you have Ambassadors, is it a formal affiliation with universities or do you work with individual professors, is it run by paid staff at a chapter or volunteers, etc.)?
  • What are your goals for the next year of your program?
  • Where can people find out more information about your program on wiki?

10:30–10:45: Break!

10:45–12:30: How do we better support each other?

Let's develop a community of shared learnings and support across geographic regions, some sort of "Education Cooperative" in the movement.

  • What makes sense for this sort of cooperative structure? Thematic groups based on level of students? Geography? Language? Stage of program?
  • How can we best sharing learnings with each other?
    • Determine best practices
    • What do you need from WMF?
    • What would make you document more?
  • Wikimedia Foundation's support - feedback
    • Overview of brochures, MediaWiki extension, online trainings, tools
    • What has worked well so far?
    • What could we do better?
  • What else can we do to mentor each other and be supportive of each other?

12:30–14:00: Lunch & open discussion time

Lunch will be provided; this time is for informal related thematic interest groups to talk (OER, Wikikids/Vikidia) or more detailed one on one conversations stemming from introductions

14:00–15:00 How do we measure success?

Established programs can share information on how they've measured success in the past, and we will agree on a baseline for what success looks like for the education program worldwide.

15:00–15:15 Break!

15:15–16:30 How can we be MORE successful?

Group discussion on setting good goals for education programs. How can we have more impact on Wikipedia? How can we be more efficient in our precious resources (volunteer time, donor money) and get a greater positive gain for Wikimedia projects globally?

16:30–17:00: Wrap-up & next steps

Recap of what we've discussed and determine where we go from here.

Come prepared!

With around 25 participants and only one day, we have a lot of ground to cover in a short amount of time! Therefore, we'd like to ask participants to do a bit of homework before the meeting.

Please come prepared with the following:

  1. A (pre-timed!) 5-minute introduction: See the agenda for talking points. Please practice this ahead of time so you keep your introduction under 5 minutes!
  2. Thoughts about sharing learnings with each other
  • What documentation would be useful?
  • What do you have to offer?
  • What do you need from others?
  1. How do you measure success, and what are the good and bad points of that measurement?
  2. What would "more success" look like for your program?

We look forward to seeing you in Milan!

Participation list

Please add your name to the interest list below, with the following format:

Country name
  • Names/usernames of 1–2 people from the country who would like to attend
  • Briefly describe any Wikipedia educational activities happening in your country, and the status of these activities.
  • What would you like to accomplish at this workshop? What would you like to learn, or what learnings would you like to share with others?

Able to come in person

Please fill out the free registration form at http://wikimediaconf2013.eventbrite.com and indicate you will be attending the Thursday event for the Wikipedia Education Program.

Algeria
  • Dr. Abd El-Haq Fareh
AR
AT
  • Claudia.Garad, We want to establish a program in Austria and I am looking for inspiration and experience
BR
  • --Ezalvarenga (talk) 21:05, 13 March 2013 (UTC) Coordinator of the education program in Brazil.[reply]
  • --Fernanda Campagnucci (Fecampa) - Journalist, coordinator of the Observatory on Education - a program held by the NGO Ação Educativa - and researcher in education at the University of Sao Paulo. Would love to learn about the experiences that are being developed by Wikimedia in the educational field around the world so that we (Ação Educativa) can understand how we can collaborate with the project in Brazil and Latin America.
CAT
  • --Arnaugir (talk) 10:57, 29 March 2013 (UTC) (Arnau Duran) In Catalonia we have had some successful experiencies with universities, masters degrees and research groups. As a member of Amical Viquipèdia, association which supports Wikipedia in Catalan, I'm willing to learn about education programs in other countries in order to improve ours. And also, obviously, to explain all our experiences (we have had some of them) with unviersity students.[reply]
CH
exemple of movie realized by third year student in University of Neuchâtel
  • Charles Andrès: Senior scientist in University , Biology. Teach how to use Wikipedia as source, but also how edit wikipedia as a new suport for personal work instead of traditional report. Creation of free media that can illustrate lesson.
  • Gabriel Thullen
CS
  • Vojtech Dostal (Vojtech.dostal)
  • To get to know with other education leaders and inform others about Czech "Students Write Wikipedia" programme (how even a small community can easily have a viable education programme)
  • More specifically, to get to know the Education extension and learn about its advantages (considering its deployment on Czech Wiki)
DE
  • Cornelia Trefflich
  • Tim Moritz
  • Daniel Mietchen (for Wiki Project Med)
  • how to increase (editors') diversity in WP and its sister projects through educational activities
  • to share experience/learnings of working with different target groups (apart from institutional groups or demographic groups, e.g. thematic groups,...) in eduaction
  • how to engage different people in long-term educational activities
  • to develop an efficient, useful tool for all of us to exchange knowledge on educational activities
  • interaction between the Education Program, OER more widely and Open Access
Estonia (EE)
  • Eva Lepik
EG
FR
HU
  • --Kalman Hajdu - We want to establish a program in Hungary and I am looking for inspiration and experience
HY
  • --SusikMkr (talk) 09:07, 15 April 2013 (UTC) - In Armenia we have some experience of collaboration with universities and high schools, but we aren't so satisfied with results. So we need to know about more successful educational projects.[reply]
IL
  • Shani Evenstein – involved in GLAM-Wiki & Wiki Educational projects in Israel. Would love to hear about others' experiences, in the hopes of improving our own efforts.
IN

Will try our best

IT
Jordan
  • Dr. Nidal Yousef
MK
  • brest
  • Kiril Simeonovski
  • Ongoing projects: "Wikipedia in Your School" and "Wikipedia at Your Faculty"
  • Sharing ideas and experience, learning from others, initiate collaboration with other.
MX
PL
RS
Saudi Arabia
  • Dr. Mohammed Alghbban
  • Dr. Sami Bin Slimah
SE
UA
US
  • Biosthmors
  • We are in the process of incorporating WEF-USCA and are looking forward to sharing ideas and learning from others.

Would like to join virtually

Join virtually!

GR
  • Mina Theofilatou, computer science teacher at secondary education level in Greece. Planning an event in March that will hopefully engage the local community in our school's projects on Commons, would like to share the learnings (and learn from others!) at the workshop:-)--Saintfevrier (talk) 07:32, 14 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
IN
UK
  • Toni Sant - Wikimedia UK Education Organiser: I'm new to this staff post at the UK chapter, so I'm keen to see how to best serve the members of our chapter and the wider UK community through learning about what people from other chapters are doing. I can only attend via Skype or whatever other appropriate means you're planning for those joining virtually.
US
  • James Salsman - working on trying to invite IBM Watson at Rutgers into the Education Program as an editor and integrating pronunciation assessment questions with Moodle.

No longer able to come