Iolanda -- Can you help me understand what is meant by "curriculum-based questions"? You use the phrase many times and each time it sounds like what I would call "teaching to the test".
sorry, maybe the expression is not the right one. "teaching to the test" can be a component, but this does not necessary mean that Wikipedia will be used only as a tool for "teaching to the test" or that Wikipedia will provide the right answers for the test[1].
I appreciate that the proposal goes on to answer many worries from an educator's perspective.
Actually I am not sure about this[2].
I suspect there are remaining worries from the perspective of the Wikipedia community which I would describe as "curiosity-based". Thanks and best regards. -- Ward
yes, I agree.
Maybe this project can drive some curiosity; in any case it will provide content. My impression is that wikipedians in general appreciate content[3].
Thanks and best regards,
Iolanda
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[1]The project has been conceived primary to address African countries. When wikipedia was distributed in high schools in Kenya by Wikimedia Kenya, students pointed out that it is nice to have Wikipedia but Wikipedia does not provide content relevant to their curricula: in other words you can use Wikipedia with a "curiosity-based" approach, but not to facilitate your schoolwork. I am not saying that a "curiosity-based" approach is not a good, relevant and useful one, but if Wikipedia claims of being an educational tool and if the movement contributes to make it accessible in schools as an educational tool, maybe it makes sense to check what you are actually providing.
This becomes a central issue if you provide Wikipedia in a way which does not allow editing. You can not use the argument "oh, if they don't find what they are looking for, they can simply make it".
In many countries "teaching to the test" is a relevant, because to obtain the primary education diploma you need to prepare exams. In a class of 100 kids, the teacher and the students do focus on the exam. Looking at the exams is a way for the project to define content which might be relevant for primary education (for the project WikiAfrica Cameroon the organisation doual'art achieved to make an agreement with the government to put online the last years primary school exams with the answers). But the project will not simply copy and paste content from schoolbooks or the answers to the exams. Here is an example from a schoolbook from Cameroon and it explains why we will not simply copy and paste existing content.
“Among the human species there are several races. The humans of black race live mainly in Africa, Oceania and America. The humans of yellow race live mainly in Asia. And they are the most numerous. The humans of white race live mainly in Europe, America and north Africa”. Jean Criaud et des enseignants camerounais, chapitre 21 Les races dans le monde, Histoire et géographie du Cameroun, C.E.2, Les classiques africains, 1992, p. 49.
Curricula is quite different from country to country. "teaching to the test" is a component, but it is not the only one. There are for example countries in which teachers create they own "didactic units". This makes it more complicated to define which are the relevant content for primary education but maybe it is possible to define some priorities.
There are also reasons to do this work which go beyond primary education
1. to fill some "Wikipedia holes". The idea is to look at primary education curricula and identify some major general topics: the world, continents, your country, maybe your city/town/village, geography, history (just to give some examples). it is quite impressive to notice that those very general content on Wikipedia can be significantly improved, and maybe the community can be interested in contributing. the project can help making sure that also the last 50 years of studies are included (particularly important for post-colonial studies)
2. to provide some ground for other content. working progressively on wikipedia i think can facilitate further contributions. in other word, it is very difficult to explain that a specialistic journal from Nigeria is notable if the article about the country is poor.
3. to contribute to linguistic editions in a specific and probably relevant way. In the feasibility study we did, Kelsey Winds who did the research about South African primary education system highlighted that teachers are expected to teach in other languages after the first grades, but often they don't feel comfortable in a second language. Wikipedia can really provide support from this point of view.
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[2] According to the preliminary study we did, the project actually does not properly respond to worries from an educator's perspective. Educators were more interested in
1. Schoolbooks. This is not possible: Wikipedia is not a schoolbook. We can produce/provide content, related but there is no way Wikipedia provide content as a schoolbook.
2. Simplified articles. This is not a feasible direction. There is the English simplified version of Wikipedia, but if we aim at provide content in many languages, we will not develop simplified version of all languages.
3. Selected documentation and exercises. This is also something we might provide while doing pilot projects in schools, but it is not at the centre of the project.
There are also two other things to consider:
a) when you look at issues related to primary education, content is not considered by many a central one. Even the report from South Africa – a country which invests a lot in education – what emerges are issues related to infrastructures, training for teachers, absenteeism of teachers, very large classes... Content appears to be a very marginal issues compared to the rest.
b) one of the people working in education interviewed in South Africa said a very interesting thing. According to him, providing Wikipedia can make "already good teachers" better ones; Wikipedia will not have an impact on the "not so-good" or "ok" teachers. I think it can maybe be the same with students; Wikipedia can support good students to become even better. I think this could be a very relevant result; as Ntone Edjabe says, there is little space in Africa for excellence.
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[3] OER Open Educational Resources will be at the centre of the project. making existing OER in cc by-sa or cc by and making other resources open.
by the way there are very few OER for primary education. i'd like also to focus on dataset of public administrations. this is a relevant focus (last year we made the dataset for Botswana but there are still 53 to go).
I have to admit that i believe the real challenge of the project is the relationship with communities rather that to the community (projects - and communities - related to education, data, languages, wikimedia commons, wikversity, afripedia, Wikipedia project pages...) and of course the wikimedia chapters and groups.
On Mar 15, 2013, at 6:20 AM, Iolanda Pensa wrote:
Wikipedia Primary School
Providing on Wikipedia the information necessary to complete the cycle of primary education in the languages used by the different education systems.
A project allowing students, families and teachers to find on Wikipedia the documentation necessary to obtain the primary school qualification in their country, in their language.
Wikipedia is meant to be an educational tool and it is currently available online, via mobile phones and offline. Experiences have shown that, once accessible, Wikipedia does not provide information that responds directly to curriculum-based questions. The project relies on Wikipedia as an existing and growing resource, it solves the need for an encyclopaedia capable of responding to curriculum-based questions, and it fosters Wikipedia content, quality and outreach.
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