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".
- 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.