Hi all,
Yesterday I had a call with Tighe and Vahid on me joining the collab: Hi!
One of the subjects that came around in our call was question in what stage other collab members are with their education programs at universities.
But let me first introduce how we came to that question. I am organising the education program for the past three years in the Netherlands and in Belgium. So far we have done projects at 6 universities/colleges, organised/organise 7 courses, and organised or participated in 26 education sessions/trainings/workshops/edit-a-thons. In most of the universities we have done trainings/workshops/edit-a-thons in Wikipedia that were individual activities, like organised by individual students, or student groups, or staff members. In two universities this has grown further to courses every year, but those are courses that are done in the capacity of the individual teachers/professors involved, and not done as a university as a whole. There it is important to keep the Wikipedia collaboration active and continue over the years, this we (Wikimedia) set as strategic priority. And at one university this has evolved further to a situation where the management of the university recognises the collaboration with Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and as the university exists now for 40 years (Maastricht), they want to do broader activities with Wikipedia this year. After my suggestion they have adopted the idea that we also organise a knowledge session and workshop for all the staff of the university that is interested to learn more about the possible collaborations with Wikipedia. There they get a introduction about Wikimedia, but especially also talks from their colleagues in the university that did the courses in the past years. We are happy with this development as this gives us stable ground at the university.
Vahid asked me if the there are phases to be recognised, and I had to answer yes and no to this. In the past month I already tried to think about this and came to the conclusion that the support and help from the university library staff is important for the developments, but at the same time makes it more complex and not that simple. But if I would define phases, we have seen so far three phases (but not every university is at the same phase): the first phase I would describe as having trainings, workshops, edit-a-thons that are only done once, have an open character, etc. The second phase I would describe as teachers/professors organise a course with us. The third phase I would describe as the phase where the management of the university recognises the collaboration somehow and takes us seriously.
These three phases describe just one possible route, the one bottom-up in the university. We also tried another route, top-down, as in 2015 we tried to talk to university management boards to have Wikipedia used in their courses, but that failed completely. I am aware that in many places in the world a different approach, tactic, program, etc is used/set-up, but does anyone of you recognise in your local edu collaboration the steps/phases we are going through? It would be interested to see where you are after/in these steps, what you have done, so that can inspire us for possible approaches and activities.
Further I am also interested in other approaches and activities, good ideas are worth copying. I would love to hear from you at Wikimania how you how you do it, what steps you took/take, let's meet! And if you want to learn from how we have done it, just ask me! :-)
One thing that I noticed in the past months that it is to me obvious that Wikipedia belongs in education, but the why that is, is still not clearly defined, so far I have seen. I think it would be good for us to clearly describe and define why Wikipedia should be used in education, described with good clear arguments, that match with the language people from universities are common to.
One of the next steps we plan to do is to create a folder/brochure we can spread to teachers/professors that describes why it is good to use Wikipedia in the classroom.
For keeping an overview and documenting the activities we have done we have a portal where we collect this (to show universities we do it already for some time) at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Benelux_Education_Program
PS: Besides this e-mail address you can also use romaine@wikimedia.nl and romaine@wikimedia.be for official purposes, it all ends up in this mailbox here.
Greetings, Romaine