hello again, Wikipedia Education participants
First, let me thank all of you who have contributed such great ideas, resource links, & offers of help with my upcoming presentation about Wikipedia for Adult Educators. Your suggestions have helped me a LOT & I am feeling much more confident about moving forward with this presentation.
So far, I've put together a rough schedule of my 1.5 hour workshop/presentation. I've included it below, & you'll notice that I've incorporated suggestions from a number of you in my planning:
To start (~ first 5 mins.): Introduction of the workshop & the presenter (me), as well as a short explanation of my perspective, about the incident which made me so passionate about access to knowledge & why I became interested in WP.
next 10 mins: What you *thought* you knew about Wikipedia: a short interactive quiz to expose some of the myths people may still believe about WP (I can post my quiz to anyone in this mailing list who is interested)
15 mins: Intro to WP. I am thinking I might just use Pen-Yuan Hsing's Vimeo presentation (https://vimeo.com/234993156) because it says what I want to say & because it is just SO excellent (I will be sure to attribute you, Pen-Yuan!)
15 mins.: Action item 1: Case Study. I would like to assign a popular topic in Adult Education which has recently seen some controversy (e.g. Multiple intelligences). Most participants will have a laptop or tablet so they can work in small groups to look up this term. Note how a quick search using Google (or even Google Scholar) yields a wealth of explanatory or how-to resources. BUT - when you look this up in WP, you very quickly see that this concept has come under debate (important to know this!!!) We can examine the anatomy of a WP article (article page, Talk page, History) to see how knowledge about the topic evolves & is presented, reviewed, and negotiated; how we can form a more nuanced view. We can also talk about how WP works to provide knowledge depth and integrity, with internal links, external links, related articles, portals, categories, discussion pages.
15 - 25 mins.: Action item 2: So what?? We could do this part in small groups or back in the large group, depending on how things are flowing. I might start off the discussion like this: Our Adult Education programs are designed to help our students transition, with confidence, into the next stage of their learning journey: whether university/college programming, a technical program, a trade, or just more strongly-informed participation as citizens, parents, community members etc. Some questions to get/keep the discussion going:
- In this world of Facebook, "fake news", tabloids, and super-easy access to all kinds of information, what would you like your students to understand about knowledge? - Knowing what you know now about how knowledge is constructed, debated, negotiated, reviewed etc. in WP, how you might use this in your practice? - How do your students currently use WP? Or -- how do you suspect they are using WP? How could they be using it more effectively? How can you use this as an opportunity to talk about where knowledge comes from & how to be critical about the information they read?
In the last half-hour (if time & interest permit): let's try editing! I'm thinking of creating a page in my WP sandbox for our professional association, & getting everybody to help us produce at least a stub article. Participants can create a WP account if they like (& will be encouraged to do so!!) or just contribute references & text that we can put together to make a stub. Would be really exciting if we could make this live & -- who knows -- maybe some people will even add to it after the workshop.
As always, I am open to more of your thoughts & suggestions.
Appreciatively Gina Bennett