Re: [Wikimedia Education] Motivation, education program goals and best strategies (it was: blog post from Namibia)

Because of Mina's comment, just adding bellow some of my conclusions on the education program. 2013/7/15 Mina Theofilatou &lt;theoth(a)otenet.gr&gt; "retention" rates. My experience in secondary education has returned practically zero "keepers": I will run a project or two each school year, the students will produce material under my - at times discreet, at times strict - guidance, and that's it: none of them gets hooked on the Wikipedia ideals - creating and sharing knowledge - to go on and become a regular editor. So I have to "start from scratch" each semester. 1. *This education program is not about bringing new contributors to Wikipedia in the short term*: if we regard the profile of who contribute to Wikipedia, which is a volunteer work, and how school tasks are generally assigned to students, where they need to proove they learned somethings from what was taught, according to our results only a few students can become active Wikipedia contributors. On the other hand... 2. *This education program is about improving the Wikipedia quality and retaining professors to support the sharing of free knowledge and Wikimedia projects*: improving the Wikipedia quality may be understood in many different ways and this should be more clearly define for the program as a whole. Although we can have high quality content of specific fields of knowledge when the Wikipedia assignments are successful, this may not be what will have the biggest educational impact on potential readers for a *educational* project. To mobilize and empower the next generation of human-knowledge generators, we should retain professors after participating of the program that can understand: 1. the importance of freely sharing online educational resources of high quality; 2. how to set Wikipedia (Wikimedia?) assignments on their courses - having in mind the benefits for students and for the readers of the content that is supposed to be created. It is important to realise that*Wikipedia is not a cause*, open educational resouces with high quality is and Wikipedia have to be seen as one possible tool. From here<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Brazil_Program/Reports/wep-general#L… . Comments welcome. If we want bring editors, most of our focus should be targeted at online strategies - for instance, the editor engagement projects<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editor_engagement>seem to have some good things. I made some comments about that whislt discussing the planning for the catalyst program in Brazil<http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Programa_Catalis… . For short, Wikipedia is an online community. And offline activities won't bring the desired goals that the strategic planning<http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Movement_Strategic… a few years ago. Comments about that also welcome, mainly if you disagree. Tom -- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) OKF Brasil - Rede pelo Conhecimento Livre http://br.okfn.org _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education