Education/About/Office Hours/March 22 2019

Ask me & Tell me Anything

hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team

Etherpad for Quick Notes

Tuesday, March 22, 13:00 UTC

Agenda

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

1. Mapping Exercis
2. Updates from Chia-Yi
3. Joy Explaining activities OFWA
4. Edit-a-thons in 3 education institutions in India
5. Affiliates Call
6. Greenhouse

Participants

1. Joy (Open Foundation West Africa)
2. Chia (Wikimedia Taiwan)
3. Melissa (WMF)
4. Sailesh (WMF)
5. Gopala (CIS-A2K)

Minutes of the meeting

• Chia-yi: I am from Taiwan mainly involved

• Sailesh: Last year education team started a mapping of Wikimedia education activities aroudn the world, done in the past and currently active. Two months for initial mapping - 100+ activities. Collected data in differente variables, country, theme, kind of education challenges, Wikimedia projects they worked on. We're opening that document for public review maybe on Monday, will be published in upcoming newsletter. We'll share the document to get feedback from community to fill out missing data. Some challenges: we don't have centralized documentation system, vast movement, multiple languages, different ways of documentation and platforms, some really well documented on outreach wiki (Armenia, Argentina), some documented on English Wikipedia, some on meta, some on dashboard. We couldn't find challenges addressed by programs documented so we want your feedback to clean the data and correct wrong information. We've created a google form for affiliates whose data is missing from this mapping exercise. It'll take around 10-15 minutes to fill, we're tracking a lot of data. We're lookingforward to get your feedback and comments, maybe I'll write an email about this for the larger community to participate on building this. Any questions? Cool, thanks!
• Chia-Yi: Thanks Sailesh, I am still digesting what you said, It is a lot of information. Liang, me and three professors will join the Education conference. For my experience, I joined the meeting in Berlin, many people asked me about the aboriginal meeting. The second part is WikiBook, we are supporting an organisations... In Taiwan we have immigrants from Now the main language for Wikibooks is Tagalog, we have finished the first chapter. We invited three woman. Next time we will have more participants. Last update is I'm working on the presentation for the Education meeting, I'd like to have some feedback if I finish on time.
• Sailesh: are you presenting the same topic in the conference?
• Chia-Yi: the topics is applying one research, because I was attending last conference in Berlin and the one scenario was about the design research so I think it's a useful tool to know. Last researh is mainly focused on users of czech republich and south korea, so I think it can also apply to students so I did some face to face to students to see what challenges they face and to know about challenge and oipportunities for students. That's what I'd like to share in the education meeting.
• Melissa: If you won't mind can you share more about the WikiBooks projects you're working with, what kind of audience
• Chia-Yi: The government is Open, Government tries to implement more elements in the education system. The students should learn an extra language. This year, we are cooperating, because the organisation is helping women from the South East Asia countries. We have more children from different countries, but we are still using Mandarin, the government and society is helping them to learn mother tongues for the immigrants. The biggest immigrants are from Indonesia and Vietnam, Phillipness community are more active, they are helping us to edit the Tagalog Wikibooks. Main target audience are junior and senior high school students.

Melissa:And they are part of a specific organization or just a group of friends who got together for this project?

• Chia-Yi: They are Fillipino-Taiwanese they want to contribute to WikiBooks

Sailesh: are you working with Wikimedians from Philipines? Because they have many languages and the challenges can be similar. Chia-yi: I will think about this and I will talk to them, I would like to. Sailesh: That's an interesting thing the government wanting to promote and learning other languages. This is very interesting for me, how also the government wants to promote their mother languages. Chia-Yi: They are trying to help people help different cultures. Joy: OFWA we have quite a number of Education activities, One I would highlight Ashesi University, we have two sets of executives for two years. It's been a success but at the same time it's been hard work. Most of the students are not Ghanian, trying to teach them English Wikipedia has been quite difficult. But at the end the students appreciated the need to have Wikipedia as a research tool. One interesting thing, the professor using Wikipedia as a lecture for their students who sometimes have assignments. One other thing is the challenge is using new people as club members cus some of the students have different programs they're learning at school and although they're itnerested in learning Wikipedia it's hard to adjust their main course of activity with Wikipedia. We started a Wikipedia contest with them and initially the signs were low cus their attention was on other things in school. We did a new strategy, telling them not only about the prizes but other education benefits. two weeks postponing the contests and we had a lot of sign up and interest. Another thing, communities aside from school. The dashboard is a challenge for us, when we train new people and we ask them to sign up in the dashboard they don't do it, we need to keep doing a lot of announcments and the need to sign to the dashboard cus this is the only way for us to track their activities. It's been a challenge but we're tryoing to find the best strategy. One is to have the trainees to assist the participants to sign up to the dashboard, cus mayby they're not used to what it is.Other thing I want to talk about is IT program for senior students (?) They don't know much about IT, we realise that the issue comes from this point, they find it difficult to fall in love in the Internet because they don't have access to IT when they're at home. Most of my existing community members are loosening interest in activities, we are planning to invite new and old members to a Wiki meetup.

• Gopala: Basically I wanted to update about the program as a trainer, the program was in three Education institutions. That was a program conducted by Kannada community members, the students don't have experience with laptop and desktops, the biggest challenges was to let them contribute in Kannada language (they wanted to edit in English first). They did good progress. It was a good workshop, usually we give topics before doing workshop... also they wanted to write on some other topics they wanted. A few of them were really interested and they're going to contribute from their mobile phone... It is often a challenge. Hopefully, we are planning for tha
• Melissa: You and Joy are facing similar challenges, regarding Infrastructual challenges... I have heard people are moving from Wikipedia to Wikidata as it is easier that Wikipedia.
• Gopala: Initially we started with the Wikipedia, we intriduced Wikidata in other workshops and they've enjoyed it.
• Sailesh: yes, I've also seen it as a challenge in India and I'd say it's also a challenge of Wikipedia app on mobile version, you can't create new articles. I still find as a volunteer that the Wikipedia mobile app is more reader friendly than editor friendly.
• Gopala: yeah actually they just find the app store and tried to edit from the mobile app and they couldn't, the interface is different and they get confused too even just reading.
• Sailesh: maybe we could add this as a topic, editing from mobile phones
• Gopala: to add: there were two groups and one group was only interested in collaborating to Wikimedia Commons. and I have a very bad experience with the Wikimedia Commons app. If I tried to upload edited photos (adjusted contrast, etc) it wasn't taking it up.
• Sailesh: have you tried giving feedback to the developers?
• Gopala: I didn't go to give feedback but I will try to give the feedback.
• Joy: We realise that they were losing interest. We wanted to boost interest, specially when clubs are starting again in Ghana with tools in Ashanti and in (Volta) region to implement Wikipedia as well.
• Sailesh: the Odia community does wiki meetups as well, we call them wiki tungi. Other communities do it too (Wiki fica), you could maybe look at the structure of how those meetups do as well. Next point in the agenda. There will be an affiliate meeting on March 28 at 11am UTC. It's for affiliates who are working on education iniatiatives, we wanna talk about some of the challenges we are facing, the best ways to address them. We are seeing today for example that in Ghana and in India we're facing the same challenges, so we wanna see how we can find partners to help us address those challenges. If you want the calendar invitation I can send it after this call.
• Melissa: Yes, I just wanted to share with you the little bit about the Wikimedia & Education Greenhouse, It is an initiative that will help a team of Wikimedians tto develop an education project from idea to reality. They will also participate in an online course. The key participants for this green house are community members passionate about Wikimedia Education projects, who understand the local education context. We are looking to support education communities those doesn't have this kind of opportunities. there are three ways communities can participate. They will be available on Outreach space, one big component will be online course. The online course will be focused on project management. You can also be a volunteer collaborators. There will be three units in theonline course and it will start on July 1st. Not only to contribute on Wikimedia projects but also learning the 21st century skills. We will share more in the Wikimedia + Education Conference and applications will open on April 5th with all information available on the Outreach space.
• Gopala: It looks like very interesting thing, I got to know about this from Sailesh. I am excited about it.