Talk:Outreach/Future of Education

From Wikimania 2014 • London, United Kingdom

Purpose of this page?

It may help once we decide for or against a rename, but I would like to begin a discussion on the purpose of this page, which hopefully will lead to some focus and direction and give us a target to aim at. The outreach category are sub categories of Category:Program, which suggests to me that they are essentially tools to develop these streams for conference.--KTo288 (talk) 11:32, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of the Outreach pages are to develop a plan for outreach in each of the target communities. This includes:
  • an overview of the topic and its relevance to wikimedians
  • organisations, events and people to target
  • wikimedian projects that would be of interest to these target communities
As this research becomes more complete, we will create pages at https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Themes which will be more friendly to non-wikimedians, introducing them to relevant wikimedian projects that may be of interest to them by putting them in context of non-wikimedian projects they may be more familiar with. Does that make sense? EdSaperia (talk) 12:37, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Rename

Although we could try and do a humty dumpty and try and make words mean what we want, the term "education reform" carries with it a semantic load that means we'll be having to explain what we mean at every turn, it will be better to retitle this page as "The future of education" the alternative title for this strand articulated at Themes. Also the current title focuses too much on individuals rather than the trend and process of education moving online. If we must keep this title can we please move to downstyle capitalisation--KTo288 (talk) 10:46, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed - the original titles for the outreach pages were just working titles, and the ones at Themes are much closer to what people understand. Feel free to change/update to reflect this. EdSaperia (talk) 12:39, 14 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Notes from the meeting between Ed, Ramat, Sophie and Annora - 09/10/13

  • The main aim is to try and get people who don’t know what is going on within Wiki-sphere and how it Wikimeadians can positively effect education reform around the world.
  • Ultimately we are trying to create a sort of matching service between Wikimedians and non-Wikimedians who have a genuine interest in education reform.
  • There is a lot of information out there in the in the Wiki-sphere but there doesn’t seem to be one central place to be able to send a non-Wikimedian to learn more about the how the Wikimedian communities and projects work.
  • The hope is that before the actual event – 2 hackathons (in March and May) can take place in which local practitioners getting a feel for the potential working with Wikimedia projects. They can then think about projects they could do with Wikimedians and present their findings at the main event in August.
  • Education Bulimia – the idea that students aren’t studying for any particular reason other than to regurgitate what they have learnt in an exam at the end of the year. Education should be more about helping others enhance and empowering students
  • A quick summary of what has been happening in the last year from Sophie’s perspective:
   o Around 60 countries are using some sort of Wiki project
   o People are trying to further its usage by using Wiki projects more in high schools for example.
   o In South America they are spending money on teacher training 
   o In Eastern Europe they are setting University assignment 
   o In Sweden PhD students are using the platform for scientific outreach 
   o In terms of resources – the Education Department in India are doing some interesting things 
   o Macedonia have hired a Wikipedian
  • There is a mailing list for that seems to be the main way to find out what is happening in the sector.
  • In terms of common groupings we can either do this by levels (e.g. primary, secondary, higher or further) or subjects (e.g. Maths, English, Science, Geography)
  • Wikiversity – there seems to be a little confusion around the aims of Wikiversity in different countries as everyone is approaching it differently.
  • In both the US and Germany there are foundations trying to run themselves.
  • We need to consider that whilst technology plays a big part in Education Reform – it’s not the be all and end all of it. We need to think about what we are actually teaching and why.

Wikiversity

message at Wikiversity

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