New Participation Requirements, motivated by community responses and information about support we get, patterns of success (better classes have stronger support from more Ambassadors)
Each class has to have 1 Amb/15 students
Every class has to have a Wikipedian present
Can't work with huge classes (over 100 students) in the short term
High interest this semester -- 55 professors in U.S., 10 professors in Canada were interested
About 35 classes and 1,000 students in U.S. and 8 classes, 250 students in Canada
Canada not just U of Toronto, also UBC and Ontario schools
Focus on quality over quantity
Have welcome packets for professors and Campus Ambassadors with clear expectations and information about the term
How do we turn the support structure over to the community?
Starting small, based on learning points from other programs
Only 7 classes participating, and only top and most interested 5-15 students involved in contributing content
Solid support structure in place in Cairo -- 2-3 CA and 1 OA for each class; even stricter than U.S./Canada this term
50% of CAs and 100% of OAs will be Wikipedians
Workshops at Cairo University and Ain Shams university for professors, 13 professors in each group, both the ones participating this term as well as 10 others
Workshops in Arabic, Wikipedians did wiki training before Rochelle's part
Focus on what you can get out of a Wikipedia assignment and why might you do it to harness your student's work into an encyclopedia forum, went through milestones in the term (outline, bibliography, first draft, peer review, etc.), assessment
Talk about challenges of grading this assignment, work in sandboxes to figure out what students have done
Professors thought plagiarism would be a problem, and thought Wikipedia is a good way to encourage students to be part of a community where it's not acceptable to plagiarize
Citation another issue; there isn't a style like MLA in Arabic, and the community's decision around citation style could come to influence publishing in the Arab World.
One professor wants to do video, will be interesting and challenging for everyone involved.
In workshops, Rochelle sat down with 6 of the 7 professors and went through their ideas, brainstorming, troubleshooting, etc. Emphasize learning goals for class, match the assignment to those learning goals. All had diverse ideas of how to use Wikipedia and were very enthusiastic.
All were going to do it with graduate students (small class) or an extracurricular activity
What was the editor community reaction when newbies started editing wikipedia (En, Ar...)? Tom
Challenges when students don't have enough support in the U.S.; working closely with Arabic Wikipedia community to make them aware of the program and participating in it early on.
