Education Pre-Conference/World cafe
This page is for a proposed session for the Wikimania pre-conference education event. Please feel free to contribute!
What is our purpose?
- to 'educate or inform educators about Wikimedia and projects? and/or - to 'listen to' educators and hear their issues and questions in order to prioritise our programs/outreach - to test ideas about education program development and impact of Wikimedia in education
How long does this session take?
Maximum 90 minutes - could be annexed to a Teachmeet and/or Lightning Talks as intro/context setting.
Who is your audience?
Teachers, academics - pre-service education, education policy makers, school governors, librarians - k-12, higher education, public libraries, cultural institutions and CILIP, library academics, students, especially teacher education students, journalists covering education matters (TES, etc).
Do we need to divide tables by education sector or geographical interest. - primary, secondary, higher education, U3A/community - policy makers, practitioners, students
How do we get your audience to Wikimania?
- What outreach/recruitment is needed?
There needs to be some audience building activity. Encourage participation through media coverage in important educational publications such as the Times HES. Invite specific people who are of interest - civil servants within Department of Education, local government education briefs, school governors, educational technologists (for a few examples)online page about the event - part of the Wikimania 2014 pre-conference with a non-wiki sign up form (such as a Google form).
Question we need to know: is there a cost associated with pre-conference? Can we waive this for invitees? are we inviting people for the full two days or just a specific World Cafe session? I think invite them for the whole two days - there would be an overall strategy for this. The cafe session would be one element where we would look to bring people of shared specific interests (not education broadly, but specific elements of education)
Who will do the recruitment?
Audit contacts that we have within the community and match potential types of invitees to the topics/programme. We need to act quickly given holiday period. We can also invite specific people via social media.
What will the content of this session be?
Issues identified by educators where they believe Wikimedia may have a role to play
Who will develop the content?
Everyone in attendance - it will be a collection of organic, flowing conversations. Pru rightly pointed out that an icebreaker, as a starting point, would be helpful. A series of sample questions for each topic for the moderator to use to keep conversation going.
What help do you need?
The most useful thing that can happen is for those in attendance to contribute to the conversation.
Develop a draft agenda
The role of Wikipedia in education - reflect all sectors Digital literacy skills and skills gaps - highlight resources existing, handout or a take away document Education policy perspectives
In the main, content will be steered by the participants to what they find interesting or useful or on a specific task.
Who will facilitate each session?
Overall facilitator - suggestions: Toni Sant, Ian or John have been suggested. Each group in the cafe session would include one moderator / facilitator who would keep the conversation going, and take notes. These would be volunteers or staff, from Wikimedia UK, the Wiki Education Foundation or the Wikipedia Education Programme.
What are the deadlines? Who is responsible for each deadline?
Deadlines aren't really too applicable here. As long as the required materials and space are available, the session can happen.
Logistics
Size of group a little difficult to predict. Require comfortable table space with good audibility around the table.
What materials do you need?
- Facilitator overall for the session
- individual table hosts
- topics preferably issues
- signage for tables - which table do I go to for this topic
- note taking (Etherpad?)
- writeable tablecloth and textas/coloured pens for doodling
What is success and how will you measure it?
Relationships - collaboration and projects or invitations to further events within 12 months Increased awareness and knowledge of Wikimedia within the broad education community - mainly in UK Increased understanding by Wikimedia of education questions and needs from the perspective of educators themselves Lists of ideas, priorities for future action by Wikimedia Education programs.