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Welcome to the Global Education Update — a newsletter from the Wikimedia Foundation that is distributed the first and third Tuesday of each month. Someone from our staff has talked with you about our Global Education Program to bring Wikipedia into higher education classrooms around the world, and we wanted to keep you in the loop on all of our exciting activities. If you would prefer not to receive these messages, simply reply to the email and ask for your address to be removed.
New program grows out of public policy pilot
The Public Policy Initiative was such a success in the 2010-11 academic year that the Wikimedia Foundation has made the commitment to include funding for more outreach to universities in its general operating budget for 2011-12. The new Global Education Program kicked off in India in June, and already, more than 1,000 students are busy editing. The U.S. program has expanded to disciplines beyond public policy, and Canadian professors are starting a small pilot as well. We look forward to working with more countries in the future. Visit the new Global Education Program page for more information.
Canadian Campus Ambassadors trained in Toronto
![Canadian Campus Ambassadors]() The Canada Education Program kicked off in August, with the first Campus Ambassador training in Toronto. Five courses from the University of Toronto are piloting the use of Wikipedia in Canadian universities in the fall. More than 1,800 students will learn to edit Wikipedia as part of this pilot. Education Program Advisor for Canada Jonathan Obar, as well as Global
Education Program Director Frank Schulenburg and Manager Annie Lin, were on hand to introduce the elements of the new program to the first Canadian Campus Ambassadors. Learn more about the Canada Education Program.
Professor in Brazil using Wikipedia in history class
![Professor Juliana Bastos Marques]() Professor Juliana Bastos Marques of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State (UNIRIO) in Brazil is piloting the use of Wikipedia in university classrooms this term. Her 20 history students will be writing articles on the Portuguese Wikipedia, with the assistance of a volunteer
editor from that community who is serving in the Campus Ambassador role. Juliana is blogging about her experiences (in Portuguese) this semester in an excellent series of posts. Read Juliana's blog.
Ambassador role opens volunteering to more people
A post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog describes how the Campus Ambassador program opens volunteering for Wikipedia to people who aren't necessarily attracted to typical editing tasks like content addition. In the blog post, Frank Schulenburg introduces Ram Shankar Yadav, a Campus Ambassador in Pune, India, who had never edited Wikipedia but is now taking a central organizing role in creating the university program in Pune. Read the blog post.
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