Dear Wikimedians,
Here is the monthly report of Wikimedia Argentina for November 2013. You can read the full report (in Spanish and English) here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Argentina/Reportes/2013-11 Also, the full reports of past months are available at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Argentina/Reportes
1. «Wiki Mundo» classroom in Aulas Creativas 2. Wiki Hackathon 3. Virtual training for teachers 4. Activity in Salta
=== «Wiki Mundo» classroom in Aulas Creativas ===
Within the framework of our educational outreach program, we started to collaborate with the educational platform Aulas Creativas (Creative Classrooms in Spanish). This platform, aimed at teachers, consists of a space to share innovative resources in education. «Wiki Mundo» (Wiki World) is the first classroom in Latin America and the only space to talk about wiki culture and resources in education. This collaboration is, as well, the first to be taken to an end within the new coordination model established in the last Iberoconf meeting.
In this way, Carmen Alcázar, from Wikimedia Mexico, current coordinator of Wikimedia Iberoconf; and María Cruz, communications coordinator at Wikimedia Argentina, are both content editors of this blog. A schedule for future posts has been created, that involves all the chapters in Latin America, as far as their educational initiatives are involved. This will enable us to generate a colourful patchwork of the experiences in the region.
Aulas Creativas owns a very vast and active audience. The website has over 6,000 unique visitors per month, and the project has 21,000 followers on Facebook, especially teachers from different places within Hispanic America. With this action, we expect to widen the audience of our actions beyond the movement's limits, and also bet on the local integration with a very concrete project.
=== Wiki Hackathon ===
On Saturday, November 30 and Sunday, December 1, we held the first Wiki Hackathon, a space where volunteers of the movement offered presentations on technical aspects involved in the different wiki projects. The crowd analyzed Wikipedia tools and also offered trainings on Git, Python, PHP, Bugzilla and Mediawiki installment.
The event was held in the Government Lab, a space for developers that belongs to the Ministry of Modernization of the Buenos Aires City Government. 16 people took part of this activity. During the first day, the participants discussed users and edit metrics, geolocalization of recent changes and census data from Argentina. These projects were coordinated by Jonas Augusto and Ignacio Iglesias. Two presentations focused on introducing newcomers to Wikipedia, directed by Osmar Valdebenito, and other about Pywikibot and Mediawiki's API, directed by Jonas.
The second day of the hackathon started with the creation of a map of edits located within the City of Buenos Aires. This allows the location in a visual timeline where are the most edited articles by neighbourhood, which is a first step towards georeference for the data hosted in our projects and its connection with the local reality. A series of improvements were applied to the Linha do Tempo, a project for metrics implemented on the Portuguese Wikipedia. The crowd also discussed the need of a bot that allows to categorize based on another wiki, according to existing categories. The presentations of the second day were two: an introduction to Git, coordinated by Patricio Molina, and another one on error management, coordinated by Dennis Tobar.
=== Virtual training for teachers ===
During the month of November, the Center for Innovation in Technology and Pedagogy (CITEP), which belongs to the Secretariat for Innovation and Academic Quality of the University of Buenos Aires, organized a massive online course oriented for training of teachers in the area of new technologies and learning teaching practices associated with them. The course «Technology scenarios: between the real and the possible» had a participation of about 2,500 Spanish-speaking teachers from around the world (including territories as far away as Albania or China), of which approximately 200 were directly involved in all the proposed practical activities.
As part of this course, one of the weeks was specifically oriented to the subject of collaborative learning environments, with a strong emphasis on Wikipedia. For this, it was created a video called "Wikipedia: open and collaborative construction of content" featuring Patricio Lorente explaining the main features of Wikipedia to teachers. A video conference was held on November 27th, with the participation of Juan Sebastian Quintero (Colombia), Fernando Da Rosa (Uruguay) and Osmar Valdebenito (Argentina) to discuss the specific activities on Wikipedia conducted in educational settings; various teachers joined the Hangout and made their own questions.
Finally, a virtual learning space was opened for editing in Wikipedia. Through a forum, teachers presented their topics of interest and were contacted by Wikipedians who acted as tutors, teaching them about various aspects of Wikipedia, guiding them through the steps of editing and encouraging them to join the site. Through this real-editing experience, many people who had never edited in Wikipedia could do it for the first time.
=== Activity in Salta ===
On November 22, the long-time Wikipedian and member of the WM-AR Board Esteban Zárate gave a presentation at the 6th Free Software Conference organized in the city of Salta, by SaltaLUG group. There, Esteban gave a talk to the attendees about opportunities for Wikipedia as an educative tool, besides explaining some basic concepts regarding the Free Encyclopedia and other Wikimedia collaborative projects. This talk is given under the Federalization project, which has enabled the conduct of activities in other cities in northern Argentina, as Jujuy and La Rioja.
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Kind regards,
*Osmar Valdebenito G.* Director Ejecutivo A. C. Wikimedia Argentina