Hello all.
I would like to report on some initiatives and ongoing projects that we have been
conducting this academic year in Spain, from our local Wikimedia Chapter, regarding the
use of Wikipedia in higher education. Several members of Wikimedia-España have delivered
courses, seminars and practical workshops on Wikipedia editing, using Wikipedia in higher
education courses, and Wikipedia participation from libraries, archives and museums (many
libraries are in universities). Overall, more than 10 sessions have taken place all over
Spain. In addition, there have been similar initiatives and projects coordinated by Amical
in Catalonia.
In many of these sessions, there has been a thrilling interest from
faculties to attend, sometimes running out of free seats in less than
24h after the announcement of sessions. In fact, we are already identifying volunteers
from our local chapter members to help with this dissemination and training sessions, so
that we can scale up effectively as new universities get on board.
We have also produced content for this sessions in Spanish. As an example, these are the
links for a workshop at University of Salamanca in March:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taller-edicion-wikipedia-USAL.pdf
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usuario:GlimmerPhoenix/Taller_USAL
As a result, we are starting to see new promising projects. More specifically:
- WikiUSAL, a new 'Wikipedia club' with students and faculties of Univ. of
Salamanca. Several teachers are already preparing plans to incorporate Wikipedia in their
courses for the next academic course (starting September 2012). This will be articulated
by an teaching innovation project at USAL: "Wikipedia as a learning tool".
http://diarium.usal.es/wiki
- Two professors at University Pablo Olavide in Seville (Biology) and University of Pais
Vasco (Physics) are also planning to incorporate Wikipedia tasks in their courses. In
fact, in the first case they were already doing so without support (there may be multiple
other cases that we are still discovering).
- At University Rey Juan Carlos (URJC, my home) we are also preparing for the next course
a proposal for a teaching innovation project, following the same lines of the USAL
initiative. We also intend to integrate participation from different departments (Computer
Science, Journalism, Medicine and Sociology).
In summary, we are quite happy to see this progress, and we will continue to help raising
new initiatives step by step. Looking forward to meeting some of you at the next Wikimania
2012 in Washington, and share some experiences and suggestions to keep up the good work.
Kind regards,
Felipe Ortega.
Board member for Higher Education and Universities.
Wikimedia España.