hello again, Wikipedia Education participants
First, let me thank all of you who have contributed such great ideas,
resource links, & offers of help with my upcoming presentation about
Wikipedia for Adult Educators. Your suggestions have helped me a LOT & I am
feeling much more confident about moving forward with this presentation.
So far, I've put together a rough schedule of my 1.5 hour
workshop/presentation. I've included it below, & you'll notice that I've
incorporated suggestions from a number of you in my planning:
To start (~ first 5 mins.): Introduction of the workshop & the presenter
(me), as well as a short explanation of my perspective, about the incident
which made me so passionate about access to knowledge & why I became
interested in WP.
next 10 mins: What you *thought* you knew about Wikipedia: a short
interactive quiz to expose some of the myths people may still believe about
WP (I can post my quiz to anyone in this mailing list who is interested)
15 mins: Intro to WP. I am thinking I might just use Pen-Yuan Hsing's Vimeo
presentation (
https://vimeo.com/234993156) because it says what I want to
say & because it is just SO excellent (I will be sure to attribute you,
Pen-Yuan!)
15 mins.: Action item 1: Case Study.
I would like to assign a popular topic in Adult Education which has
recently seen some controversy (e.g. Multiple intelligences). Most
participants will have a laptop or tablet so they can work in small groups
to look up this term. Note how a quick search using Google (or even Google
Scholar) yields a wealth of explanatory or how-to resources. BUT - when you
look this up in WP, you very quickly see that this concept has come under
debate (important to know this!!!) We can examine the anatomy of a WP
article (article page, Talk page, History) to see how knowledge about the
topic evolves & is presented, reviewed, and negotiated; how we can form a
more nuanced view. We can also talk about how WP works to provide
knowledge depth and integrity, with internal links, external links, related
articles, portals, categories, discussion pages.
15 - 25 mins.: Action item 2: So what?? We could do this part in small
groups or back in the large group, depending on how things are flowing. I
might start off the discussion like this: Our Adult Education programs are
designed to help our students transition, with confidence, into the next
stage of their learning journey: whether university/college programming, a
technical program, a trade, or just more strongly-informed participation as
citizens, parents, community members etc. Some questions to get/keep the
discussion going:
- In this world of Facebook, "fake news", tabloids, and super-easy
access to all kinds of information, what would you like your students to
understand about knowledge?
- Knowing what you know now about how knowledge is constructed, debated,
negotiated, reviewed etc. in WP, how you might use this in your practice?
- How do your students currently use WP? Or -- how do you suspect they
are using WP? How could they be using it more effectively? How can you use
this as an opportunity to talk about where knowledge comes from & how to be
critical about the information they read?
In the last half-hour (if time & interest permit): let's try editing! I'm
thinking of creating a page in my WP sandbox for our professional
association, & getting everybody to help us produce at least a stub
article. Participants can create a WP account if they like (& will be
encouraged to do so!!) or just contribute references & text that we can put
together to make a stub. Would be really exciting if we could make this
live & -- who knows -- maybe some people will even add to it after the
workshop.
As always, I am open to more of your thoughts & suggestions.
Appreciatively
Gina Bennett