Education Pre-Conference/Safe school sandbox
The need
Different jurisdictions have laws, e.g. under-13s are not allowed to use public web sites, which make it difficult to use WikiPedia in education. A solution to some of these problems could be a sand-box that is only accessible to students in a collection of schools. This session will be a combination of hack-session, to start prototyping such a thing, and a discussion opportunity for teachers, to talk about what is required from such a site, and to experiment with the prototype, and discover what still need to be done to make it a tool that could be used with classes.
Issues to solve
- Seed the sand-box with an initial amount of content, copied from, say, Simple English wikipedia. Probably initially this is manual copy-and-paste.
- Authentication: how can we get the target students in as simply as possible, but only those students and teacher.
- SAML/Shibboleth/LTI/...
- A skin so it is clear to students when they are in the safe sand-box where then can edit, and when they have followed a link to elsewhere.
- How would this be used by teachers and classes?
Practicalities
- Time: This could be a one-day session.
- Target audience: MediaWiki hackers, teachers.
- Facilitator: Wikimedia UK developer/voluteer.
- Next steps: Charles will reach out to Wikimedia UK tech list
- Space requirements: Try to connect it to existing hackathon