Ask me & Tell me Anything

hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team

Friday, February 15, 15:30 UTC

Etherpad for Quick Notes

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Agenda

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

Education activity in Portugal (Hotel Management)
New web of the project Wikipedia at University
Wikimedia+Education Conference 2019 in spain
Mobile Learning Week
IYIL
Mapping exercise
Education Portal

Participants:

Sailesh Patnaik (WMF)
Paulo (WMPT)
Florencia (WMAR)
Melissa (WMF)
Nichole (WMF)
Homecudine Turki
Galib
Gopala (CIS-A2K)
Rajeeb

Minutes of the meeting:

Sailesh: Let's start with introductions
Galib: I’m from Bangladesh, working for Creative Commons, Wikimedia projects, founder of OER Bangladesh.
Nichole: I lead the education team at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Melissa: I work for the Wikimedia Foundatio, Education team
Florencia: Working with the Wikimedia Argentina,
Paulo: From Wikimedia Portugal, started recently with larger scale projects with universities, orienting two projects, one in Lisbon remotely at ISCTE and one localy at ISAL, a university focused on tourism and hotel management
Sailesh: Working as communications and outreach contractor at WMF
Paulo : We had the first meeting 13 Feb. to show the Wikimedia projects in education, mostly Wikipedia and Commons. Using Brazil former successful projects as an example (e.g.: https://www.academia.edu/26864663/A_wiki-pedagogia_no_Jornalismo_o_caso_do_Projeto_Wikipe_dia_da_Faculdade_Ca_sper_Li_bero). Planning the next meeting on the 20th of Feb. Improving articles on municipalities and parishes with each class taking on a topic for articles based on the discipline that they are in. Also will include photograph activities to provide images for the article. Starting on 1 March with workshop for the students. We will develop courses for the students of these classes, the teachers themselves asked about it, so they would know how to edit Wikipedia and use Commons before starting the project. We’re planning for events with the teachers. We are going to use the dashboard. We are planning to do a scientific paper, so that it can evaluated and lessons learnt and reused.
Nichole: We want to know what students learn when they get involved with Wikimedia projects? (Nichole can you add what else you said) It's helpful to have that data when we go and try to advocate to partners.
Paulo: That was one of thing that teachers wanted to know, how to evaluate reliability in Wikipedia articles. We plan to measure that, it's part of the evaluation.
Florencia: It sounds really good, Paulo. A new web called Wikipedia at University (here it would be great to have the link), We made a website of the project, we thought it would be useful to put in one place, so put what we've done in 2017-18, and some testemonials from teachers. We always do surveys after the work to learn more about the students point of view. A teacher asked us to make a survey from before and after, and we've done that, and the results are really interesting!
Melissa: I want to highlight some of the topics, how conversations with teacherts they really want that data about what students learn. It's really important to collect that data if possible when doing these types of activities. I have a question from your website, How do you keep a track of that
Florencia : We use different tools to track the data, we do surveys, then we pass that to a spreadsheet, we do this regularly after the work.
Sailesh: What data do you collect about your programs?
Florencia: We count amount of teachers trained, we look at gender parity, we look at number of articles created, differences between new articles and existing articles
Florencia: We use metrics.wmflabs to know the number , we haven't found a better tool to do this yet
Galib: Thanks for joining the call, we have Wikimedia + Education conference in April. There will be the gathering of Wikimedia leaders, students and instructors there. There are dozens of submission related to OER, Education and others. It is a good opportunity to join the conference and learn
Paulo: I proposed a joint panel with a coleague from Brazil, Rodrigo Argenton, on Commons + Education, and it was approved. As we have no scholarship and very limited resources, and the timing was also difficult, Argenton will be participating alone, and hopefully report back to us here about the sucess of the panel and his experiences and learnings at Wiki Edu Conf.
Nichole: Melissa and I will be at the Mobile Learning week, we will have John Cummings, WMDE, WMSE and some other participants. We are going to present about how Wikipedia uses AI, but
Nichole: This is the year of Indigenous languages, if you have thought or ideas please reach out to the education team. How it can help
Paulo: We have a partnership in a school in Bissau, I was starting to do a partnership. I would like to know what are the resources for Africa? They have one or two
Nichole: You could also contact Isla?
Florencia: we have this in mind! if we can develop a proyect, we will let you know!
Nichole: We will be reporting after the eve
Sailesh: In July we did some mapping exercises to map education activities that are happening in the movement. The initial work was done by interns in a two month activity. It was challenging to collect all the data, because some data is missing, some data isn't easily found. We gathered data from many different sources, but it was spread out and hard to find. End of Feb we will make the spreadsheet open for a public review for the community to support correcting wrong or missing data.People will initially be able to comment on the spreadsheet with their input.
Gopala: I am working with CIS-A2K, India.
Sailesh: Education portal has changed quite a bit, we have added a new design. We're trying to make the education portal more accessible for the community, add more resources, have the community be able to share more of their work. If you're doing interesting programs that can be replicated by other community members, please share it in the portal, we can make the space more resourceful. If you've seen the newsletter we have also made new changes to the template of newsletter articles, not a lot. Last October when we shared one of the articles from Tel Aviv on Twitter it was retweeted by the university but it wasn't tagged and it reached thousands of people. So we have added one more section to the article where we want you to add the social media handles of any institution you're working with so when we share it in our social media we can tag them and the institution will know we're promoting their activites. That's one more option you can add and then add category of your education activities under certain programs. We want that when someone new comes looking for resources related to a program I can just go to education/newsletter/Wikicamp (for example) people can find examples of the program they want to do. In the future please categorize newsletter articles by the kind of activity.
Galib: I really like the new updated space of the education page. Social media is really important. I really appreciate Sailesh and others that have made the changes.
Gopala: It looks great. A few letters are not so visible though (ex. Collaboration with Yerevan State University of Languages and Social Sciences after V. Brusov) could have a different color
Sailesh: Thanks for the feedback, maybe we can have a brighter version of that color
Nichole; We can call Maria, she helped us a lot with the education space design.
Sailesh; Yes, credit to Maria for the colors and design help too
Paulo: for the education conference what I'm missing there is a proper hastag to spread the word on twitter, I didn't know what to put there. keep in mind when organizing anything to have social media aspects in mind so we can put in twitter and all social media networks and see how the hastag is being spread
Sailesh: Good idea, we'll reach out to Galder or someone from the Basque community to share this
Galib: Education activities in Bangladesh in schools, can we share that in newsletter'
Sailesh: yes, maybe involve students as well in writing the articles
Galib: I'll make another discussion and talk about it in the next office hours
Sailesh: any other topics?
Nichole: I really liked the discussions about evaluation today, Maybe we can have another office hours dedicated to how we're evaluating our programs around the world. Really interesting discussion to have
Sailesh: Maybe something in March, I'll keep that in mind
Sailesh: thank you all for sharing, it's been really cool to hear about the different projects today