Education/Newsletter/December 2015/Wikimedia Argentina, about the global and local in the digital and academic communities

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By Christian Cariño (Wikimedia México) and Melina Masnatta (Wikimedia Argentina)

Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina

Snippet: Aprender para Educar writes about Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina.

The digital free magazine Aprender para Educar (Learning to educate) of the National Technological University (UTN) is recognized in the community of education and technology in Argentina to write about innovation issues in Spanish, which is not common in the academic dissemination and teacher training field.

Cristina Velazquez, general editor of the magazine invited Wikimedia Argentina to write an article that generally describes their activities in the Education Program, after reading the proposal she decided to publish it as the main article of the 12th edition.

To describe the education program, WMAR wrote two notes completing one another, as doing a zoom: from the local to the global and from the global to the local, showing how a movement of this magnitude does not stand alone, it is part of a huge network.

Melina Masnatta, education manager in WMAR and Patricio Lorente, chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees wrote those two notes.The first one focuses on the Education Program, implementation, challenges and obstacles that they had at the beginning, plans to integrate it into the classrooms in Argentina and how different Wikimedia Projects are also relevant in education. The most important thing, Melina adds, is to strengthen the values that inspire them, show how the free culture give meaning to education in general and digital culture in particular.

Meanwhile in the second part, Lorente focuses on the global movement, the community pillars, the agenda of today's challenges and the effort of their volunteers as protagonists. It is not easy show the world what drives us and why we work as volunteers in different countries. In education very few people understand the value of building free knowledge. There is still a great prejudice or negative perceptions of Wikipedia in the classroom because teachers ignore how Wikipedia is built.

Everybody reads Wikipedia, but few people edit it. We can change this fact by spreading in spaces such as the Journal of the UTN and inviting more people to collaborate and be the protagonist of this huge collective work for humanity.

Read more about the Wikipedia Education Program in Argentina here.