[Wikimediaau-l] English Teachers' Association presentation
Liam Wyatt
liamwyatt at gmail.com
Sat Nov 29 11:19:32 UTC 2008
Dear all,
Yesterday I gave a presentation to the annual NSW English Teachers'
Association conference loosely based on the fact that Wikipedia is
now an optional HSC text.
You can search for the full details from the association's website
here: http://www.englishteacher.com.au/
There were about 20 teachers attending the workshop which lasted for
an hour. Rather than trying to give a detailed discussion of how
Wikipedia can be studied in the context of the HSC I did three
things: a "why you need to know", an "anatomy of a page" and some
examples of how WP can be used to start conversations in class (such
as how to be critical of texts).
You can see the PDF at the "presentations" page at meta: http://
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations/en
I would really like some feedback on this from a wikipedian's
perspective - it was very well received by the teachers.
As an outcome of this presentation I have learned that there are a a
couple of schools intending on taking the WP module at the HSC for
their students in the next year. Most notably a catholic school in
Maitland (near Newcastle). I promised those teachers that were
interested in introducing WP into their school - either as a module
for study or just as a way to discuss things with their students
(such as how to be critical of texts, how to write collaboratively
etc.) that WM-Au would try to help however we could. I gave them our
website and I have every intention of going to visit these schools if
invited to talk to staff and/or students. Hopefully several of us
would be able to go on these kinds of visits.
To that end WM-Au would need to have approval from the department of
education and be put on the "approved visitors" list. I will begin
this process for us next week. It shouldn't be difficult or long. It
basically means that we would need to list all of the people who we
say can represent WM-Au and the DET may then undertake a check of
police records to see that we are not restricted from contact with
children. This will then give WM-Au a "visitation number" and place
us on the list that all schools have.
In other news, I spent all Thursday at a conference discussing the
ramifications of the Australian federal government's planned internet
censorship programme. The schedule is here: http://
www.bakercyberlawcentre.org/2008/censorship/index.htm
It was very informative and quite scary too, this is something that I
believe everyone of us needs to be informed about as it will affect
us directly - we deal with free information and this is a direct
curtailing of that. Please see more at http://nocleanfeed.com or
<selfpromo> listen to the most recent episode of wikipediaweekly.org
podcast </selfpromo>
I hope you are all well,
-Liam
[[witty lama]]
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