[Wikimedia Education] Bringing academia to Wikimedia projects and events (it was Education Digest, Vol 10, Issue 3)

(Adapting the subject to an adequate one) Hi all, this is a very important issue and we all involved in the global efforts to involve universities to improve Wikipedia - and, if I may add, raise awareness on the Wikimedia movement, which we could go deep, but let's retrict ourselves to the apparently solely goal at the moment. Wikimania is far from an academic event. Fact. Only a few academics would be interested in attending to it or, if they would be interested, would have time for it. Fact. The first time I've heard about Wikimania was during my masters studies, in 2005. I was already somewhat involved with Wikipedia, but even as a masters student, I would never think about going to what I've read at that time what is this event about. Instead I would go to a summer school (as I did in a previous year) or an academic conference that would be regarded by funding agencies. This is the view of a MS student, you can imagine a researcher who has to give number of papers/conferences/books and so on to survive inside the academic world (well, the well know publish or perish <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish>) Frank has asked me to see with the five professors in Brazil who joined the Wikipedia Education Program if they would be interested in a meeting in the mid of the semester to share their, his and ambassadors experiences with the program. I've asked three of them until now (one is Juliana who raised the subject we are discussing here, who already gave the nice idea to transform the event in an academic meeting) and my feeling is that they will attend when they have time, which is not that much - waiting other professors answers and reactions to Juliana's proposal. I don't know very much about Wikipedia Academy <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Academy> and I'd love to hear more details about it and if it's aligned to the purpose of bringing attention of the academic world to Wikimedia projects, not only as a research field (indeed, a very interesting one, as Benkler teach us, for instance), but maybe as a source of inspiration from interesting peer production process that academia has a lot to learn - I believe that in a ideal world, if most forms of knowledge was freely shared, raw reserarch data, for instance [1], the processos of building new knowledge would be much faster (this is far from happening, if it will). I belive that professors joining these global education efforts are usually those commited to education. Those I've choose are.* I thnk one way to bring more attention from academia would be to invest more thoughts (I am not saying it was not invested) on how would professors, key figures in this program, together. The program is expanding now. How will professors, with such scarce time, share their experiences and how would they benefit from it? I believe those are a few and important challenges to make the program expand inside academia. Best, Tom *Besides most public universities in Brazil have education as one of their pillars, research comes first. I've seen a lot of professors who produce amazing educational resources, but they are treated in the same way as those professors who simply copy and paste American or European books on the blockboard, instead of using some of their time to do what is written in the contract with the institution he or she works. [1] http://pantonprinciples.org/ On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:51 PM, Bart &lt;bart.humphries(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation