Welcome, Romaine!
You beat me to the introduction email :) Thank you for giving us a
comprehensive summary of your experience in your region. I'm excited to
have you participate in this group and help us achieve our shared goals.
I'd encourage collab members to consider Romaine's question about phases in
university relationships. If anyone has relevant experiences to share,
please do :)
Cheers,
Tighe
--
Tighe Flanagan
Senior Manager, Wikipedia Education Program
Wikimedia Foundation
tflanagan(a)wikimedia.org
On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 3:23 AM, Romaine Wiki <romaine.wiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi all,
Yesterday I had a call with Tighe and Vahid on me joining the collab: Hi!
One of the subjects that came around in our call was question in what
stage other collab members are with their education programs at
universities.
But let me first introduce how we came to that question. I am organising
the education program for the past three years in the Netherlands and in
Belgium. So far we have done projects at 6 universities/colleges,
organised/organise 7 courses, and organised or participated in 26 education
sessions/trainings/workshops/edit-a-thons. In most of the universities we
have done trainings/workshops/edit-a-thons in Wikipedia that were individual
activities, like organised by individual students, or student groups, or
staff members. In two universities this has grown further to courses every
year, but those are courses that are done in the capacity of the individual
teachers/professors involved, and not done as a university as a whole.
There it is important to keep the Wikipedia collaboration active and
continue over the years, this we (Wikimedia) set as strategic priority. And
at one university this has evolved further to a situation where the
management of the university recognises the collaboration with
Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and as the university exists now for 40 years
(Maastricht), they want to do broader activities with Wikipedia this year.
After my suggestion they have adopted the idea that we also organise a
knowledge session and workshop for all the staff of the university that is
interested to learn more about the possible collaborations with Wikipedia.
There they get a introduction about Wikimedia, but especially also talks
from their colleagues in the university that did the courses in the past
years. We are happy with this development as this gives us stable ground at
the university.
Vahid asked me if the there are phases to be recognised, and I had to
answer yes and no to this. In the past month I already tried to think about
this and came to the conclusion that the support and help from the
university library staff is important for the developments, but at the same
time makes it more complex and not that simple. But if I would define
phases, we have seen so far three phases (but not every university is at
the same phase): the first phase I would describe as having trainings,
workshops, edit-a-thons that are only done once, have an open character,
etc. The second phase I would describe as teachers/professors organise a
course with us. The third phase I would describe as the phase where the
management of the university recognises the collaboration somehow and takes
us seriously.
These three phases describe just one possible route, the one bottom-up in
the university. We also tried another route, top-down, as in 2015 we tried
to talk to university management boards to have Wikipedia used in their
courses, but that failed completely.
I am aware that in many places in the world a different approach, tactic,
program, etc is used/set-up, but does anyone of you recognise in your local
edu collaboration the steps/phases we are going through?
It would be interested to see where you are after/in these steps, what you
have done, so that can inspire us for possible approaches and activities.
Further I am also interested in other approaches and activities, good
ideas are worth copying. I would love to hear from you at Wikimania how you
how you do it, what steps you took/take, let's meet!
And if you want to learn from how we have done it, just ask me! :-)
One thing that I noticed in the past months that it is to me obvious that
Wikipedia belongs in education, but the why that is, is still not clearly
defined, so far I have seen. I think it would be good for us to clearly
describe and define why Wikipedia should be used in education, described
with good clear arguments, that match with the language people from
universities are common to.
One of the next steps we plan to do is to create a folder/brochure we can
spread to teachers/professors that describes why it is good to use
Wikipedia in the classroom.
For keeping an overview and documenting the activities we have done we
have a portal where we collect this (to show universities we do it already
for some time) at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Benelux_Education_Program
PS: Besides this e-mail address you can also use romaine(a)wikimedia.nl and
romaine(a)wikimedia.be for official purposes, it all ends up in this
mailbox here.
Greetings,
Romaine
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