I believe this is what Asaf means: < http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor%3E. The demo is here: < http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox%3E.
Pretty cool, if you ask me!
- GW
On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 10:18 PM, Bart banaticus@gmail.com wrote:
Which visual editor? I thought there was no true visual wikimedia editor, since it would have to basically be its own server, what with templates, etc.
Banaticus
On 20 December 2011 18:12, Asaf Bartov abartov@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi, Jan.
Thanks for sharing this! It's very valuable to see the different models
of
engagement with educators around the world. I had been involved in some educational outreach myself in Wikimedia Israel, and they have been
doing a
lot more of that in the past few months, and I hope they could share
their
experiences and models (in English) soon too.
Some comments in brief about your report:
- the GEP operated by the WMF is certainly only _one_ model, and
obviously
neither the only nor the first model to successfully engage with
education.
It is very likely that the GEP model is not suitable for all
geographies,
and that we don't have the resources to engage in the GEP model
everywhere.
So it's great to collect models-that-work, for others to learn from and maybe try.
- re the community's openness to technical features such as the visual
editor: it's best to start a conversation about it sooner rather than
later.
Has the visual editor been discussed at all in the cswp community? Have people played with the demo?
- Do you have thoughts about how to expand work in the Czech Republic
without taking up so much of Chmee2's time? I.e. can this scale to
support,
say, 20 concurrent classes?
Once again, thanks for sharing! It would be great to find a corner to record this more lastingly, perhaps on the Outreach wiki. Is there
anyone
on this list willing to curate this?
Cheers,
Asaf
On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 1:46 AM, Juan de Vojníkov <
juandevojnikov@gmail.com>
wrote:
This is a cross mail to educational-l and WMCZ board.
Hi folks,
on December 12, 2011 seven Czech Wikipedians (mostly scollars and researchers) met in a tearoom in Prague, Czech Republic to disscuss
issues
relating cooperation between Wikipedia and an educational institutions.
At
first some of the projects were presented and participants had a
possibility
to ask details about these projects. Then broad discussion on different topics continued.
At the time, there is one project running by the cooperation between Wikipedians and teacher and one project which is runnig just by teacher iniciative. Other ambassador x educational institution projects are in
the
different stage of preparation (mostly attracting teacher and training). There is not just interest from the side of Wikipedians to start such cooperation, but also teachers directly come to use Wikipedia in the classroom by the means of edditing it.
Seemingly the most successful project, running at this time on cs.wp,
from
which we may learn is the cooperation between user:Chmee2[1] and a
teacher
of ecology from the Institute for Environmental Studies from Faculty of Science of the Charles University. Chmee2 was contacted at
Wikikonference
2010 after presenting a project aiming to develop articles about
protected
areas (=ecology) by a Ph.D. student, who introduce him to the teacher.
Half
a year later around 30 students were instructed how to edit Wikipedia.
If
they create NPOV, good article with references and images, they will
recive
a credit. User Chmee2 periodically reads students work, repair it and
offer
them a feedback. Thus the teacher doesn't have extra work with that. To
the
end of the semester students present chosen protected area (e.g. via MS PowerPoint) in class. Teacher and Chmee2 give them a feedback and
together
with the teacher and other students they give them questions to push
them to
think about the topic. Thus it gives students 2 values: a) they study
and
understand the topic, b) they got variegation in education and good
feeling
that their work will be useful. Chmee2 says: "The ambassador must have a time for such project. While in U.S. people are proud of having an
editing
experience with Wikipedia and they can have it in CV, in the Czech
Republic
that is nothing special and there is a luck of motivation. Thus
ambassadors
are old Wikipedians themselves."
So it seems, that this might be one of the models which may work in the environment of the Czech Republic, while to see if other ambassador like programs will work we have to wait some time.
Thus we spent quite a lot off time in discussing the motivation factor
for
students, teacher and/or ambassadors. It seems in it there would be a
need
of some credit system supporting ambassadors and/or teacher to become a valuable part of such cooperation. But this encounter legal issue of
schools
– you have to negotiate it with school functionaries. User:Hawkzn
things it
might be possible, while User:JirkaDI sees it like structural problem.
Other "problems" comes when newbies coming to the Czech Wikipedia. There is a luck of mentors for them and they have to face both technical (wikisyntax, templates, standards) and social problems (unpleasant
users,
lack of social interaction, just templates on their discussion page).
Thus
we have agreed to focus on setting up some features from en.wp such
gadget
Cite[2] or Wikilove. At this time User:Vojtech.dostal comes up with the information that Wikimedia Foundation's (WMF) developers is close to
WYSIWYG
editor for Wikipedia, but user Chmee2 is afraid that most of the good
tools
from WMF might be reject by the local community.
The group is not just aware how to motivate more people to get into the cooperation and how to create friendlier environment for newcomers, but
also
comes up with questions how to communicate an offer to a teacher to
start
participate and how to motivate her/him to start up with the project.
Thus
participants will share their experience via Wikipedia on WikiProject EDU.[3]
Finally could be assumed that this first meeting and hopefully not last, come up with a lot of answers and positive mood to continue with such
work
and overstep problems which will come up. There is a common will to
continue
in such work. Participants understand they should be slow in getting
more
work and work together, but as every participant has some amount of
internal
pride, they will probably work separately developing and testing new
models.
Some of them call to go to younger leaners (high school, elementary),
others
disagree and call to join seniors (via lifelong learning courses).
If you understand Czech you can joint us via Ambassadors's page[4] and
see
there also our projects and their state.
Best regards, Juandev Chmee2
[1] http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedista:Chmee2 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_expander [3] http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedie:WikiProjekt_EDU [4] http://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedie:Ambasadorstv%C3%AD
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
-- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education