Re: [Wikimedia Education] request for presentations, suggestions, hints

Hi Gina, I can share with you how I do this in West Africa. The situation there is a bit different, I was presenting Kiwix (www.kiwix.org), an off-line Wikipedia reader, to teachers who had very little experience with Internet in general. They have modern cell phones, laptops but Internet connections are not reliable and very expensive. - I start by talking about what happens when the Google something. Most of these teachers have had access to Internet when they go to cities. I then show them (I usually have connection through my own phone) that Google displays information from Wikipedia. So they have probably all used Wikipedia, even those who do not know specifically about the encyclopedia. - I then talk about Kiwix and off-line access to Wikipedia - Each teacher, using Kiwix, looks up a subject that they know a lot about, in their field of teaching. That way they usually find out that no matter how much they know, or how much their printed teaching resources show, there is a lot of information on Wikipedia that is new to them. Sometimes it is just details, sometimes more important sections of knowledge. When distributing Kiwix in West Africa, I have found out that we need to spend half a day or so exploring the encyclopedia for teachers to be convinced that it can be useful to them. In my experience in Geneva (Switzerland) where there are absolutely no connectivity issues, it also takes a few hours to show and convince my colleagues of the potential of Wikipedia for their classrooms. But you say you have about 1.5 hours. So I would suggest a few ideas: - Your colleagues probably all know about Wikipedia, but maybe a bit superficially. I would go over with them how it works: internal links, external links, related articles, portals, categories, discussion pages, etc. - Are some of the adult students foreign language speakers? You could also show the inter wiki links, and explain that the English Wikipedia has the most articles, those in other languages are not just translations but have been written by contributors who may not even speak English! - Challenge the audience to come up with some information that is not correct on Wikipedia. I usually do this with my colleagues, and they have yet to come up with a major error in Wikipedia. I do not count spelling mistakes... - I also talk about the way articles a reviewed before publication in peer-reviewed journals, and compare that to the way articles are written and improved anonymously on Wikipedia. When an paper is submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, the reviewers do not know who has written the paper. They can only judge the paper on it's own merits. Wikipedia is the same: there is no authority that has signed the article, you have to judge the article by checking the references... That comparison usually goes well with university audiences. I am very interested in how your presentations goes. Please keep us informed. Best regards Gabriel On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 8:03 PM, Jackie <jackie.koerner(a)gmail.com> wrote: It topics comment who the talk of Powerpoints, share in which _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education