Education/Newsletter/April 2014/Wikimedia Deutschland: Summary of activities in March 2014

Wikimedia Deutschland on board of the exhibition ship MS Wissenschaft

Foto: MS Wissenschaft 2014 - Visualization, CC-BY 3.0

Wikimedia Deutschland will be on board of the exhibition ship MS Wissenschaft (“MS Science”). Under the heading „Digital unterwegs” (digitally on the move), the converted cargo ship will be on its journey through Germany and Austria for about four and a half months, starting its tour in Berlin on 6 May 2014. We will have our own exhibit on the ship, an interactive touchscreen that gives the visitors the opportunity to follow the route of the ship and read the Wikipedia articles for different points of interests along the way. In March we continued developing and testing the prototype in cooperation with our software team and started planning a public event in Bremen, where the ship will lay at anchor from 30 May until 1 June.

HIVE Berlin Learning Network

In March we officially launched the website for the HIVE Berlin Learning Network. The project that we initiated together with Mozilla aims to create a platform for people of all ages and population groups in order to make them aware of the possibilities of digital learning and the benefits of free knowledge. In mid March the project team met in the office of Wikimedia Deutschland to exchange ideas and to discuss the further planning for 2014, inter alia a maker party at the Open Knowledge Festival 2014.

cMOOC initiative of the German speaking chapters: Wiki Dialog (Wiki Dialogue)

In March we continued working on our project “Wiki Dialog” (“Wiki Dialogue”) that aims to improve social processes in Wikipedia through cMOOCs (connectivist Massive Open Online Courses). We recently launched a project website (German only) with more information about the project for those who want to participate. The contacts for the project are: Julia Kloppenburg, Dirk Franke (WMDE), Raimund Liebert (WMAT) and Muriel Staub (WMCH).

Action group “Free Education”

The action group we started together with Creative Commons and the Open Knowledge Foundation in order to increase awareness for and acceptance of Open Educational Resources in Germany started its work in March. We started contacting potential partners and planned a networking event in April. Moreover, we initiated a collaborative work process to develop political positions on OER in Germany. Also, we launched the website www.buendnis-freie-bildung.de (German only) that will be expanded with more content throughout the year.