Ask me & Tell me Anything

hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Education Team

Etherpad for Quick Notes

Tuesday, May 21, 15:00 UTC

Agenda

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Update from last office hours
Education activities on mobile phones
Connect space
Greenhouse update

Participants

Sailesh (WMF)
Melissa (WMF)
Rajeeb (India)
Jagseer (Wikimedian in Residence, Punjab)
Mohammad
Arash
Nichole (WMF)
Gopala (India)
Sadik Shahadu (Ghana)
Jesse Asiedu-Akrofi ( )

Minutes of the meeting

Sailesh: will provide contact between Rajeeb and coordinator of old citizen project in Kolkata
Rajeeb: format changes when editing through phone, it's not easy. It takes a lot of you. I was in a presentation in a workshop where I requested students and audience how much do you spend on Facebook, social media, etc. people spend 4-6 hours on mobile phone. We could utilize this area on wikipedia or commons or wikidata.
Sailesh: there's a game called the Wikidata game. a lot of education acitivites they are letting students play that game, it's easier to contribute in that way.
Rajeeb: yes, games are a more attractive option.
Sailesh: I'd like to localize the connect space for some time in outreach, it's taking a long time. I'd like to have it ready by early june. space for education community to ask for some help and engage with each other, I'm trying to share an example with you but I'm not having stable connectivity. If you go to meta you can find an example there and I'm trying to bring the same on outreach wiki.
Jagseer: I'm about to embark on a school to teach students and teachers about wikipedia. I'm recording an audio book which is in Punjabi language with students for Wikisource, we'll upload it to commons and add them to wikisource. we'll focus on recording the audiobook and video for wikisource content.
Melissa: How did you coordinate with this? With specific students or teachers?
Jagseer: Actually school owner is Satdeep's friend. There was several meetings before and it lead to this project. Now I started working on top of my other activities.
Melissa: What's the timeline like?
Jagseer: There's no timeline, it's not sure how's it gonna last. This program was started in April 2019, they want to involve the students as much as possible with Wikimedia projects, he's engaging students for as long as possible but not sure how long it's gonna last.
Sailesh: What is your main role? How you helping students?
Jagseer: I'm working as a teacher there, there's a course at the school level with the subject of Wikimedia. Like every teacher takes classes, I also do the same. He's helping students be part of the movement. They're paying me a salary, I'm not a volunteer in this capacity.
Melissa: How did you go about assiging the curriculum in this project. What are you covering in this? Just little curious to know about that.
Jagseer: Initially we introduced Meta and other project. Later we introduced Wikipedia. Main goal of this project is teaching students to scripting in Punjabi language Wiki. This activity is continueously going on. There will be summer camp in the month of June and we are teaching Wikisource. Also, two will be clicking photos and that will be uploaded to commons.
Sailesh: I will share few links. That will take you to Education Newsletter. Please share this on newsletter.
Jagseer: So I did try to find a newsletter article this month but I didn't have time to finish it, I'll write an article in the June newsletter.
Rajeeb: Maybe you could share how to write an education newsletter article.
Sailesh: Yes, maybe in the next office hours I can share the steps to how to write an education newsletter.
Sadik: Hi my name is Sadik from Ghana, I volunteer with the Wikimedia Ghana community and a co-founder of Global Open Initiative Foundation here. We also submitted an application to the Greenhouse project. I just joined to learn more about this projects.
Melissa: Update from Greenhouse: We recived 15 team applications. 100 individual applications. Individuals will join online course which starts in July. Group applications is being evaluated by the selection committee and the selected team will be announced on June 12.
Sadik: We are working on a project on some of the local languages communities in Ghana and we're working on the Twi and () Wikipedia which isn't currently live yet. We've been running an editathon, last one will be in June and then we'll move to another language. We're also working on the internet in a box devices which we want to deploy to communities in Ghana, we have received two devices and we want to see how we can work with the activities that have little to no access. We're currently looking for funding to supply more of the devices to the communities so they can have access to wikipedia offline. we're working with students who want to document (), we had funding to build websites for students for free so they can document activities and projects from school for free, to be part of the OER network. With this students have access to document and learning materials, blogs where they can share their thoughts and we use it as a social media platform. that's the first year. we're looking for more students, we have about 17 students who have their own websites and a few of them have started publishing their content on their website which we want to develop into a full course. we want to let students and some of the facilitators give their learning materials to the public.
Melissa; what are the ages of the students in these projects?
Sadik: internet in a box: primary to high school so they can have access to wikipedia and others, for OER network we're working with university students who want to document their activities in school.
Sailesh: with the smaller language wikipedia you're working in the incubator?
Saidk: yes, we started in 2017. we had a series of meetings with the school of languages where most of these teachers use local languages, that's where they graduate from. we had meetings with them but we're not able to make the Dagbanilanguage wikipedia live because some of the communtiy members were not very strong. we're going to use this project to revise the connection we had with them. our intention is take it out of the incubator and develop it into live wikipedia. we worked on the twi wikipedia in 3 phases, in june will be the last phase. then we'll move on to the next new language that we want to move out of incubator.
Sailesh_: the internet in a box you're providing to the students, which language edition wikipedia do you have there? do the students who use it contribute to wikipedia?
Sadik: for now we have english wikipedia, but we want to assemble the device to add as many languages as possible from ghana. They are planning to add more resources or more languages where students can access it offline.
Melissa: Really curious to know, what are the response or reception of the teachers on Internet-in-a-box
Sadik: Overwhelming. Some teachers were really happy to see that they access Wikipedia without the Internet, we are providing it for free. We have currently working with 8 schools. We have managed to secure 2 of the devices and need funding to deploy as many devices as possible these schools in the rural communities
Sailesh: repeat update from Connect (see above)
Sadik: I'm wondering if somebody has experience with dealing with the lack of keyboard for their language? or contact to develop this?
Sailesh: my language doesn't have its own keyboard, there are some keyboards for bengali. the indic wikipedians face this challenge
Rajeeb: in bengali we mostly use download language script. I could check if it's available for your language. then your keyboard english alphabet can be changed to work on your own language.
Gopala: our challenges in Kanada is that we have 2-3 keyboards layouts. in the workshops it's a challenge to move to one single keyboard layout, they're similar to other layouts and they're not interested in doing that and they'll find some difficulties and not type in any keyboards.
Sailesh; it's one of the challenges that we don't have an answer to that.
Jesse: Sadik, you can partner with kasahoro a local language app in Ghana for translation to twi
Rajeeb: Sadik download the language script from the link and try to use the keyboard for your language for Windows based desktop/laptop, https://ka-twi-keyboard.soft112.com/ all the best and let me know your feedback.
Sadik: Thank you for sharing this Rajeeb
Rajeeb: You are most welcome brother.