Welcome to the Wikipedia Education Update — a newsletter from the Wikimedia Foundation that is distributed the first and third Tuesday of each month. Someone from our staff has talked with you about our Wikipedia Education Program to bring Wikipedia into higher education classrooms around the world, and we wanted to keep you in the loop on all of our exciting activities. If you would prefer not to receive these messages, simply reply to the email and ask for your address to be removed. Learn more about subscribing or read the archives.

Open professor call answered by 36 in Brazil
A pioneering initiative was held by the Brazil Education Program for the second semester of 2012: from an open call for professors, we received 36 proposals from all regions in Brazil in less than one month. Professors showed strong interest in joining the Wikipedia Education Program. We have selected an initial group of 8 proposals; the professors will attend a workshop organized by the Wikimedia Foundation on August 11 in São Paulo. Wikipedia Education Program Director Frank Schulenburg will be present at the workshop. More professors will be invited to join the program during the semester and to attend a second workshop that will be held in Rio de Janeiro. The Wikipedia community is also eager to participate — we've received more than 80 applications from volunteers to support education activities as Ambassadors. See the open call.

Wikimedia UK hosts upcoming Edu Wiki Conference
Wikimedia UK is running an event September 5-6, 2012, in Leicester, UK, looking at Wikipedia, Wikiversity, and related charitable projects in terms of educational practice. It's a chance to talk about innovative work in your classroom, your institution or online community, and shape the future of Wikimedia UK's work in this area. This is useful for educators, scholarly societies, contributors to Wikipedia and other open education projects, and students. Guests from around the world are welcome. Learn more and register to attend!

Cairo professor's work featured on Wikimedia blog
Dr. Abeer El Hafez, a Spanish professor at Cairo University, participated in the Cairo Pilot of the Wikipedia Education Program last term, and her work was highlighted in a post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog. Dr. Abeer's 13 students worked on 31 articles on both the Arabic and Spanish Wikipedias, in some cases doing translations and in others writing articles from scratch. The students all wrote on Latin American authors. Read more about Dr. Abeer's work. 

Ambassador blogs about transnational scholarship
Georgetown University Campus Ambassador Kelsey Brannan wrote a post for the Wikimedia blog highlighting the work she's done with Professor Adel Iskandar to promote transnational scholarship between the United States and the Arab world. Professor Iskandar's students write articles for the English Wikipedia on media figures from the Arab world, and he's hoping that courses in the Cairo Pilot will expand the work by translating his students' articles into the Arabic Wikipedia. Read the post.