Education/About/Office Hours/April 23 2019

Ask me & Tell me Anything

hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team

Etherpad for Quick Notes

Tuesday, April 23, 14:30 UTC

Agenda

Which topic would you like to share/discuss/ask about? Add your suggestions here:

1. Wikimedia Education session at "WikiCamp Chattogram 2019"(https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikicamp_Chattogram_2019/en )
2. Wikimedia Education Greenhouse
3. Data mapping exercise
4. Using cellphones for education activities
5. Reading Wikipedia in the classroom
6. Newsletter

Participants

1. Mohammed Galib Hasan (WMBD)
2. Sailesh Patnaik (WMF)
3. Nichole Saad (WMF)
4. Melissa Guadalupe (WMF)
5. Mossab (Wikimedians Levant UG)
6. Yogesh K S (IT4Change)
7. Rajib
8. Matteo Ruffoni

Minutes of the meeting

• Galib: From Bangladesh, As a Education outreach program coordinator, area of interest in Open Educational Resources and interested in Education in South Asia
• Mossab: Campaign including 30 courses in the University, from Hashemite University in Jordan

• Galib: Last week, Wiki camp was an one day event for experienceWe conducted a lot of sessions on Wikipedia and Commons. I took a session on Wikipedia Education Program, There were a near about 10 participants in the camp, they wanted to know more about the Education movement. Community members were interested on Greenhouse, one of them wanted to apply as a team.

• Nichole: The meta page is very structured and nice

• Yogesh: Hi, I'm CSYogi on Wikimedia projects, I mainly contribute to Wikidata. IT4Change which is  a non-profit organisation.

• Nichole: It would be great if you could share what you're doing in the Newsletter or in the country pages.

• Melissa: Over the weekend we recieved the first team application for the Greenhouse! May 12th is the deadline, so there is stlil time. If you are following us on social media, we've been sharing different graphics on how to apply and what the different components are. I'm also taking emails or hangouts calls for those who have specific questions about the Greenhouse.
• Galib: For team application we should have atleast 3 members?
• Melissa: Yes, correct, that's a minimum but you can have more.
• Sailesh: In case you haven't hear about it the mapping exercise is open for community input. This is going to be a resource for the education community to use this data which is organized in different ways, depending on the activity for example. We have also missed a lot of programs or activities in this document like today learning about IT4Change doing education activities, so these are the activities we were not aware of and couldn't add it to the mapping data. So if you see your activities are not there there's a Google form for you to put your missing data into the mapping exercise. Questions?
• Galib: Is it a continuous process for the community?
• Sailesh: It's going to be a continuous process and we're thinking how we can use this data into Wikidata or something, we're working with the Wikipedia & Education UG for that. Most likely this will be a continuous process.
• Galib: I think this will help us a lot if it's going to be continuous, the data can be very useful for the team and how we're moving. This is a very good initiative and hopefully we'll continue next year.
• Sailesh: Thank you, yes this is something too to show the educators how diverse the projects are, this can be used by community members when approaching education institutions to show how in different countries we have education activities using Wikimedia projects.
• Nichole: we want it to be a complete picture of past and present Wikimedia and education activities, that's why we need the community to review the data and add the data that's missing. In the next year we want to use this data to share with the community important data points about Wikimedia and education.
• Sailesh: the next point in the agenda is because Paulo from Wikimedia Portugal is interested in doing Wikimedia and education activities using mobile phones. Anybody has any experience or ideas?
• Yogesh: contributing through mobile is hard, it's challenging, but there are several tools that can help. In the school where we work we use Kiwix to run the local servers offline and the tablets are used to view pages. During the teaching training we encourage them to use mobile dictionaries, if you can add multiple dictionaries in the same device has especially helped language teachers.
• Mossab: i am long term mobile version user-- Mossab but internet connection is very weak on my side
• Nichole: Can you share your experience with the group? Do you find it easy to contribute on mobile in your language?
• Sailesh: in 2015 I was working with an entire community contributing on mobile. But if you try to write a new article in wikimedia app you can't, you have to go through google chrome and then come back to mobile app to contribute to the article. it's challenging, the language tools are not very well supported in different platforms. a very good example I saw in the education conference, Galder asked us to translate something and then I saw the indian language wasn't written properly, contributing through mobile is challenging. Mossab is also a mobile contributor.
• Nichole: it can be really challenging if students have to go throigh the chrome and then go back to the mobile app. if it's going to be used by students and teachers it has to be easier, specially for teachers. it seems like achallenge to be use this in a classroom, but it's really really important to make it easier because most of the world have more access to mobile than to laptops. I'm glad we're discussing this.
• Yogesh: I think the wikidata contributing has been made very esasy through the games to play in the mobile even with low connectivity. it's small contribution but important, I think those are very easy to do in the mobile, very responsive to do on the mobile. in the education context it can be tried out in a classroom.
• Sailesh: some scripts are harder than other. how do youcontribute to wikidata? is there an app?
• Yogesh: no, we use the browser to open the tools page and then we start playing the games. I'll share the link: https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/distributed/
• Galib: sometime when contributors make their edits from mobile the browser is an issue. one of my new contributors sometimes open the minibrowser and the IP is blocked for mobile editors. I'm not sure it happens in other contexts but in Bangladesh but the users who try to contribute from mobile get blocked for open IP.
• Mossab: regarding the IP problem that most of education members suffer from, there are three options that can help in this regard: inform students before the event to create the account in their homes, also before the event you can request IP extension on meta regarding the IP you are editing to use in the event, and the third one is that as you know I think in the Dashboard there is a choice that you can create account using the Dashboard if you have the account created for access. so these solutions help in such events, personally I've tried all of them.
• Nichole: we're waiting for the approval of a new project for next year, it's called Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom. We want to create a toolkit for teachers and pilot those materials in at least three countries in two different languages. We definitely want to pilot somewhere in south asia, keep it in mind cus we will be reaching out to community members to pilot these resources and tools.
• Sailesh: I want to share the newsletter and let you know about the deadlines. Submissions are due by the 18th of the month and we publish on the 22nd of the month.