Education/Newsletter/October 2014/Bulgarian college teachers "became nodes" in the Wikipedia Network

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By Vassia Atanassova, Ph.D. (Bulgarian Wikipedia)

Snippet: Bulgarian telecommunications professors learn about the network aspects of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a network of knowledge.

On October 13, 2014, a 3-hour lecture was given to faculty from the College of Telecommunications and Post in Sofia, discussing various issues related to Wikipedia and wikis. In Bulgaria, this probably was the first lecture dedicated to Wikipedia, which was especially targeted to teachers, rather than students. The lecture, titled "Network Aspects of Wikipedia," read by Vassia Atanassova, Ph.D., is part of a stream of professional development lectures under the heading of "Abstract Networks", which researchers from the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics and other institutes of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences are delivering to the CTP.

The aim of the lecture was to reveal the philosophy and technology of Wikipedia: Wikipedia as a hyperlinked and referenced network of knowledge, free resources and language versions, as well as a network community of readers, volunteering contributors, software developers. It was discussed as a socio-technical system, where interesting phenomena of synergy and stigmergy take place, and help changing the landscape of the Internet.

Wikipedia and its sister projects were also presented in the context of traditional and new media, and special attention was paid to the controversies of usage of Wikipedia in the classroom. The meeting was on the crossing point of Wikipedia and higher education and the discussion covered all the pros and cons, all the whethers, whens and how tos of using Wikipedia and wikis in educational context.