CEE Meeting 2017

Author: VMasrour (WMF) (talk) 04:24, 27 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Summary: Highlights of Education at the CEE Meeting of 2017

The 2017 edition of the Central and Eastern European Wikimedians was held in Warsaw, Poland, on September 22-25.

The CEE meeting had a very coherent program, with sessions that allowed for concentrated discussions around topics such as Political and legal impact on Wikimedia projects, Wikidata and Wikidata related projects (parts 1, 2 and 3!), and education of course! From day 1, when the participants were introduced to the Ethnowiki Project, at the National Museum of Ethnography, it was inspiring to see initiatives that can combine GLAM and education initiatives. Another great example of this overlap was Macedonia’s award-winning project of which you can read more in this learning pattern.

In the session dedicated to education, experiences were shared from

Armenia: the vision for an education ecosystem, and the systematic work to reach this vision that has borne so many fruits in that country
Serbia: formal teacher training, ongoing for several years, with recognition from the Ministry of Education. A second project, focused on higher education students that is proving to be very successful is a 5 days wikicamp. It’s probably something that every CEE Affiliate should try in their own country at least once: 2 participants actually became Board Members of Wikimedia Serbia!
Greece: A very effective MOOC to train educators that is now “blending” to include offline meetings with educators
Belarus: an experimental approach to interactions with students at the pre-grad level with different activities.

A surprise came from Ukraine: NickiSpeaki shared his experiences in high school student work that have been ongoing since 2015. Find more information on the project page.

Another surprise came from the participation of Finland, Teromakotero shared some very impressive projects. One of them is the creation of Open Educational Resources (Textbooks made the Wiki way) by a group of volunteer educators from Finland: https://fi.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikikirjasto:Perusopetuksen_osasto This might prove to be an interesting model. To get the teachers to participate, he created a MOOC on Wikiversity: https://fi.wikiversity.org/wiki/Perusopetuksen_Wikiloikka The Facebook group for the participating teachers has over 1000 members.

If you want to access videos of the 2017 CEE Meeting, Wikimedia Polska generously made sure to record as much as possible of the meeting in this playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGthWZtDb6-BArV8_-5iHky_8KV-BpGZ4

Tags: Education, CEE, 2017, Armenia, Serbia, Belarus, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Macedonia