MENA Wikipedia Education Program meeting, Bassiyouni Hamada
- Dr. Basiyouni Hamada
- Interviewed on 10/17/11
- Cairo University
- Vice Dean of Mass Communications
- Connected through Adel Iskandar
- Kuliyat al Alam
- Next Steps
- He wants to start now and create a wiki page for the courses.
- He wants to find editors to serve as Online Ambassadors
- Style of Messaging
- Adel introduces the program
- Sara introduces herself
- Adel describes the State of the Arabic Wikipedia, mentions that it's a disgrace that the Arabic content on WP is so minimal
- Would be good to have a stronger online presence of the language
- He was mainly concerned about getting accurate information and the authorship of the articles
- If we are going to exchange ideas it's going to be hard to express this in an indigenous language
- Adel: a large contribution of editors for Arabic can and do potentially come from outside of the MENA region
- Takeaways
- Basiyouni is excited about the program but he needed more convincing because of the democratic system of WP and how this works
- Basiyouni teaches Arabic classes with 100 students each in a methodology and communications class
- 350 students total, with 200 taking an Arabic class
- Students write about Current Affairs, Revolution, Elections, Arabic Image, Parliament, Tourism, History, Education, Economy
- 2nd year students take a Methods class
- 3rd year students take international communications
- B.H. think community is too ignorant to collaborate and that it might be too difficult. He believes that the majority is too ignorant
- Consider targeting Distance Learners who are a population of almost 100,000 students (for this dept. at Cairo)
- Opportunities
- The Media resources at Cairo University are very good.
- Dr. Basiyouni's department wants to translate all Arabic text
- Cairo University has the largest Media libraries in the region. Dr. B has the goal of putting all of this information online
- Bassiyouni is very well connected with the region's communications/mass media channels. As the vice-chair, he attends a lot of conferences and
is well connected
- Challenges
- BH strong Arab Nationalist, educated at Cairo U.
- There is little material to work from
- Some courses are in English and Arabic
- 100% of the students use the computer and write papers
- Access to technology
- Self management of students
- Classification can be a challenge
- Quotes
- "You have to empower your students; other professors don't want to do this." - BH
- "Unemployment in Cairo is most expensive, especially among educators." - Adel
- Debrief
- We met with Professor Bassiouny who is the interested in the program but he's much more cautious and learning about how Wikipedia works.