Hi all,
This is a brief report on the two Wiki workshops in Tamil Nadu in the previous two weeks
== *Coimbatore - 26 February 2011.*
This workshop was conducted in the PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, as part of their Technical festival Kriya 2011. I arranged for this workshop through cold calling - I mailed a dozen colleges in the Coimbatore area, proposing a wiki introduction section and the students union head of PSG replied with a request for a formal proposal to present to their dean. I did so and the workshop was okayed. It was a closed workshop - only for students attending Kriya 2011 and had a registration fee of Rs. 100 (for which the attendees got a participation certificate from the college).
150 students had pre-registered for the workshop and about a 100 turned up on the day. The capacity of the computer lab was 50 and we had arranged for three separate sessions. The sessions were about 1.5 hours in length with 45 of minutes of me talking and another 45 minutes of editing wikipedia live. All the computers in the lab had internet connections and so it was easy to teach them edit directly (and earned the lab's IP a couple of warning templates in en wiki). The first two sessions had like 75 people and the last one 10 people (post lunch only a few turned up). It was a typical engineering college crowd - familiar with social networking/file sharing/search the internet for assignment "research", but nothing more than that. They all had used wikipedia but were unsure about editing it - the most cited excuse was they didnt think they were upto it.
The sessions were a mixed success - half the crowd had turned up for the participation certificate and it was difficult to retain their attention. But the other half was eager to learn something new and there were a few very enthusiastic people eager to contribute
(photos and report in Ta wiki - http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E... )
*March 5, Puthanampatti, Trichy
*This was a completely different experience from the previous week. While i had arranged the PSG workshop, this one came looking for me. Two of the faculty members of Nehru memorial college at Puthanampatti near Trichy had attended the NIT -Trichy workshop on Feb 20 and had liked what they saw. They asked me if i could do a workshop in their college. It is a rural arts and science college sitting in the middle of nowhere. It has excellent infrastructure - faculty that cares, good labs and a fantastic library but the students are terminally shy.
This workshop was organised under a UGC scheme for students appearing for govt exams, so the theme was slightly different - how to use wikipedia as a learning resource. There were the usual two sessions - a couple of hours of me blabbing and an hour of hands on editing. Nearly 100 students attended the first session where i introduced wikipedia and taught them how to use it as a learning resource (chasing the references, ref desk, commons, wikiversity, wikibooks, wiktionary etc) and how editing an article on the subject would require researching which leads to learning on their part. There were a few IAS/competitive examinations aspirants in the audience and i was to able to show how wikipedia would help them learn faster than say competition success review et al. The intro session went well, but when we reconvened for the live session after lunch, the non-computer science students didn't turn up at the lab. The organisers said they left because they are unsure of using internet. But the compsci crowd remained and we spent a good one hour editing Tamil wikipedia. We created an article in Ta wiki for their college, added references, photos, internal links, external links, categories etc and they got the general idea of wiki editing very quickly (which led to a rash of experimental articles and an increase in workload of ta wiki admins :-)). Since this was the compsci crowd, teaching them wiki markup was remarkably easy - they immediately grasped it and started editing articles.
The college paid me 2500 Rs allocated to the "resource person" by UGC for such activities. It was an awkward situation accepting money - but they had to present their accounts and show that the money allocated by UGC was actually spent, so i couldnt say no. I took the money and donated 2100 Rs (minus my travelling + pamphlet expenses) to the foundation. Maybe the chapter can work out some sort of guidelines for this whole getting paid in the line of outreach thing. (The donation to foundation minus expenses was an idea i got from the prevailing paid editing practice in en wiki)
Photos and tamil report here - http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E...
What i took away from these two workshops is this - urban students have more exposure to internet, but (as is the norm) distracts them from doing anything productive. Rural students haven't been "corrupted" yet by social media and other shiny things, but are very very shy in coming forward to do new things.
regards Bala Jeyaraman
Wow, Bala. Thanks much for this.
Maybe we could link this from Wikimedia.in too so we can collate all outreach programs over the years, please?
The sessions were a mixed success - half the crowd had turned up for the participation certificate and it was difficult to retain their attention. But the other half was eager to learn something new and there were a few very enthusiastic people eager to contribute
You know, my take on this is that half is a pretty good number - I've found this in some of my work as well - people have very different motivations for participating but if we can get a reasonably decent subset of attendees interested, it has been successful. A question I have, is there any particular material you have found more useful than others? Or any particular approach?
The college paid me 2500 Rs allocated to the "resource person" by UGC for such activities. It was an awkward situation accepting money - but they had to present their accounts and show that the money allocated by UGC was actually spent, so i couldnt say no. I took the money and donated 2100 Rs (minus my travelling + pamphlet expenses) to the foundation. Maybe the chapter can work out some sort of guidelines for this whole getting paid in the line of outreach thing. (The donation to foundation minus expenses was an idea i got from the prevailing paid editing practice in en wiki)
This seems like a good idea, Bala. I'd leave where a person chooses to donate the money, Foundation or Chapter, up to the individual but would love to hear feedback on this. My personal opinion, of course.
Thank you.
Best,
Gautam ________ http://social.prathambooks.org/
Hi Bala Jeyaraman,
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:30 AM, Bala Jeyaraman sodabottle@gmail.comwrote:
Hi all,
This is a brief report on the two Wiki workshops in Tamil Nadu in the previous two weeks --snip--
Delighted to read your reports and observations. I firmly believe in wiki academy events in colleges with good infrastructure as the way to do outreach with maximum effect. I have done about 5 of them in Andhrapradesh and published reports of the same on blog and on wiki (in Telugu). I am eagerly looking for volunteers to take the thread and do more. I am glad to see your initiative in Tamil wiki.
I appreciate your gesture of donating the fee minus expenses received from the college to the foundation. Your suggestion to chapter to work out better mechanism/policy with regard to the same is welcome.
Cheers Arjuna Rao Chavala http://teluginux.blogspot.com/2009/10/6-2009.html (Telugu blog about the first Telugu wiki academy) Article in Telugu wiki newsletter Tewikivarthahttp://te.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%AA%E0%B1%80%E0%B0%A1%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%AF%E0%B0%BE:%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80_%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%B0%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%A4/2010-12-07/%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%BF%E0%B0%95%E0%B1%80_%E0%B0%AA%E0%B1%88_%E0%B0%85%E0%B0%B5%E0%B0%97%E0%B0%BE%E0%B0%B9%E0%B0%A8%E0%B0%BE_%E0%B0%B8%E0%B0%A6%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%8D%E0%B0%B8%E0%B1%81on Telugu wiki academies
Hi Bala
Many thanks for this. There are some very interesting points you've raised here and I'd second Gautam's questions. Would love to hear from you on what material worked best and which part of the sessions do you think were the most engaging for the audience. Also, would be really useful if you could tell us how you addressed the points on "not being upto editing" as well as "being shy."
Many thanks. /hisham/ *India Programs - Wikimedia Foundation*
skype : hisham.wikimedia google talk: hmundol@wikimedia.org
On 3/8/2011 10:30 AM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote:
Hi all,
This is a brief report on the two Wiki workshops in Tamil Nadu in the previous two weeks
== *Coimbatore - 26 February 2011.*
This workshop was conducted in the PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, as part of their Technical festival Kriya 2011. I arranged for this workshop through cold calling - I mailed a dozen colleges in the Coimbatore area, proposing a wiki introduction section and the students union head of PSG replied with a request for a formal proposal to present to their dean. I did so and the workshop was okayed. It was a closed workshop - only for students attending Kriya 2011 and had a registration fee of Rs. 100 (for which the attendees got a participation certificate from the college).
150 students had pre-registered for the workshop and about a 100 turned up on the day. The capacity of the computer lab was 50 and we had arranged for three separate sessions. The sessions were about 1.5 hours in length with 45 of minutes of me talking and another 45 minutes of editing wikipedia live. All the computers in the lab had internet connections and so it was easy to teach them edit directly (and earned the lab's IP a couple of warning templates in en wiki). The first two sessions had like 75 people and the last one 10 people (post lunch only a few turned up). It was a typical engineering college crowd - familiar with social networking/file sharing/search the internet for assignment "research", but nothing more than that. They all had used wikipedia but were unsure about editing it - the most cited excuse was they didnt think they were upto it.
The sessions were a mixed success - half the crowd had turned up for the participation certificate and it was difficult to retain their attention. But the other half was eager to learn something new and there were a few very enthusiastic people eager to contribute
(photos and report in Ta wiki - http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E...)
*March 5, Puthanampatti, Trichy
*This was a completely different experience from the previous week. While i had arranged the PSG workshop, this one came looking for me. Two of the faculty members of Nehru memorial college at Puthanampatti near Trichy had attended the NIT -Trichy workshop on Feb 20 and had liked what they saw. They asked me if i could do a workshop in their college. It is a rural arts and science college sitting in the middle of nowhere. It has excellent infrastructure - faculty that cares, good labs and a fantastic library but the students are terminally shy.
This workshop was organised under a UGC scheme for students appearing for govt exams, so the theme was slightly different - how to use wikipedia as a learning resource. There were the usual two sessions - a couple of hours of me blabbing and an hour of hands on editing. Nearly 100 students attended the first session where i introduced wikipedia and taught them how to use it as a learning resource (chasing the references, ref desk, commons, wikiversity, wikibooks, wiktionary etc) and how editing an article on the subject would require researching which leads to learning on their part. There were a few IAS/competitive examinations aspirants in the audience and i was to able to show how wikipedia would help them learn faster than say competition success review et al. The intro session went well, but when we reconvened for the live session after lunch, the non-computer science students didn't turn up at the lab. The organisers said they left because they are unsure of using internet. But the compsci crowd remained and we spent a good one hour editing Tamil wikipedia. We created an article in Ta wiki for their college, added references, photos, internal links, external links, categories etc and they got the general idea of wiki editing very quickly (which led to a rash of experimental articles and an increase in workload of ta wiki admins :-)). Since this was the compsci crowd, teaching them wiki markup was remarkably easy - they immediately grasped it and started editing articles.
The college paid me 2500 Rs allocated to the "resource person" by UGC for such activities. It was an awkward situation accepting money - but they had to present their accounts and show that the money allocated by UGC was actually spent, so i couldnt say no. I took the money and donated 2100 Rs (minus my travelling + pamphlet expenses) to the foundation. Maybe the chapter can work out some sort of guidelines for this whole getting paid in the line of outreach thing. (The donation to foundation minus expenses was an idea i got from the prevailing paid editing practice in en wiki)
Photos and tamil report here - http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E...
What i took away from these two workshops is this - urban students have more exposure to internet, but (as is the norm) distracts them from doing anything productive. Rural students haven't been "corrupted" yet by social media and other shiny things, but are very very shy in coming forward to do new things.
regards Bala Jeyaraman
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Hisham and Gautam,
The following are my conclusions from my limited (3 workshop) experience:
The best way to grab their attention is to switch off/use sparingly the powerpoint presentation and talk to them about the articles they understand. I have to make it clear upfront, i am not a faculty/staff lecturer/enemy of the people.
The students suffer from a serious case of power point poisoning - their eyes glaze over and they go to the "seminar mode" after a couple of slides. And on the other extreme are the wikimedia editor / jimmy wales videos - they are shiny, distracting and IMO ultimately pointless to the Indian audience - they dont understand the accents, dont know the background and this becomes sort of "watching english film videos" where you kind of get something is going on but dont know what exactly it is. The pamphlet we distribute is pretty much useless for the session, but it works well after they have gone home - provided they retain it. (I have received a few mails saying they lost the pamphlet and would like a softcopy to show to others)
I have found out using live examples works best. I talked about wikipedia articles on subjects familiar to them (academic subject articles are an absolute no no in the beginning). I have been using Sachin Tendulkar, TASMAC (which has a specific cultural connotation for Tamils), Tamil nadu 2011 election article, latest films, their favourite actors/actresses. For encouraging them to edit, i encouraged them to begin at the plot section of the movie they watched last. This helps a lot in giving them confidence and shows them that there is something they can edit and can help overcome the shyness. Anything that makes them titter amongst themselves and go nudge nudge wink wink is effective. Use academic subjects and "serious" examples only when addressing questions of data verifiability etc. In both the workshops i walked a lot around the room - stand at the podium all session and you risk being yet another "aapeecer" (stuffed shirt).
Sundar,
I will document my posts to Wikimedia.in shortly
regards Bala
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:07 PM, hisham mundol hmundol@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Bala
Many thanks for this. There are some very interesting points you've raised here and I'd second Gautam's questions. Would love to hear from you on what material worked best and which part of the sessions do you think were the most engaging for the audience. Also, would be really useful if you could tell us how you addressed the points on "not being upto editing" as well as "being shy."
Many thanks. *hisham* *India Programs - Wikimedia Foundation*
skype : hisham.wikimedia google talk: hmundol@wikimedia.org
On 3/8/2011 10:30 AM, Bala Jeyaraman wrote:
Hi all,
This is a brief report on the two Wiki workshops in Tamil Nadu in the previous two weeks
== *Coimbatore - 26 February 2011.*
This workshop was conducted in the PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, as part of their Technical festival Kriya 2011. I arranged for this workshop through cold calling - I mailed a dozen colleges in the Coimbatore area, proposing a wiki introduction section and the students union head of PSG replied with a request for a formal proposal to present to their dean. I did so and the workshop was okayed. It was a closed workshop - only for students attending Kriya 2011 and had a registration fee of Rs. 100 (for which the attendees got a participation certificate from the college).
150 students had pre-registered for the workshop and about a 100 turned up on the day. The capacity of the computer lab was 50 and we had arranged for three separate sessions. The sessions were about 1.5 hours in length with 45 of minutes of me talking and another 45 minutes of editing wikipedia live. All the computers in the lab had internet connections and so it was easy to teach them edit directly (and earned the lab's IP a couple of warning templates in en wiki). The first two sessions had like 75 people and the last one 10 people (post lunch only a few turned up). It was a typical engineering college crowd - familiar with social networking/file sharing/search the internet for assignment "research", but nothing more than that. They all had used wikipedia but were unsure about editing it - the most cited excuse was they didnt think they were upto it.
The sessions were a mixed success - half the crowd had turned up for the participation certificate and it was difficult to retain their attention. But the other half was eager to learn something new and there were a few very enthusiastic people eager to contribute
(photos and report in Ta wiki - http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E... )
*March 5, Puthanampatti, Trichy
*This was a completely different experience from the previous week. While i had arranged the PSG workshop, this one came looking for me. Two of the faculty members of Nehru memorial college at Puthanampatti near Trichy had attended the NIT -Trichy workshop on Feb 20 and had liked what they saw. They asked me if i could do a workshop in their college. It is a rural arts and science college sitting in the middle of nowhere. It has excellent infrastructure - faculty that cares, good labs and a fantastic library but the students are terminally shy.
This workshop was organised under a UGC scheme for students appearing for govt exams, so the theme was slightly different - how to use wikipedia as a learning resource. There were the usual two sessions - a couple of hours of me blabbing and an hour of hands on editing. Nearly 100 students attended the first session where i introduced wikipedia and taught them how to use it as a learning resource (chasing the references, ref desk, commons, wikiversity, wikibooks, wiktionary etc) and how editing an article on the subject would require researching which leads to learning on their part. There were a few IAS/competitive examinations aspirants in the audience and i was to able to show how wikipedia would help them learn faster than say competition success review et al. The intro session went well, but when we reconvened for the live session after lunch, the non-computer science students didn't turn up at the lab. The organisers said they left because they are unsure of using internet. But the compsci crowd remained and we spent a good one hour editing Tamil wikipedia. We created an article in Ta wiki for their college, added references, photos, internal links, external links, categories etc and they got the general idea of wiki editing very quickly (which led to a rash of experimental articles and an increase in workload of ta wiki admins :-)). Since this was the compsci crowd, teaching them wiki markup was remarkably easy - they immediately grasped it and started editing articles.
The college paid me 2500 Rs allocated to the "resource person" by UGC for such activities. It was an awkward situation accepting money - but they had to present their accounts and show that the money allocated by UGC was actually spent, so i couldnt say no. I took the money and donated 2100 Rs (minus my travelling + pamphlet expenses) to the foundation. Maybe the chapter can work out some sort of guidelines for this whole getting paid in the line of outreach thing. (The donation to foundation minus expenses was an idea i got from the prevailing paid editing practice in en wiki)
Photos and tamil report here - http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%AE%B5%E0%AE%BF%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E...
What i took away from these two workshops is this - urban students have more exposure to internet, but (as is the norm) distracts them from doing anything productive. Rural students haven't been "corrupted" yet by social media and other shiny things, but are very very shy in coming forward to do new things.
regards Bala Jeyaraman
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.orghttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
Thank you, Bala.
The best way to grab their attention is to switch off/use sparingly the powerpoint presentation and talk to them about the articles they understand.
Really interesting - I would have thought that an slidedeck introduction would work but your point is something I shall incorporate in to my learnings.
And on the other extreme are the wikimedia editor / jimmy wales videos - they are shiny, distracting and IMO ultimately pointless to the Indian audience
Would 'Indian' videos, so to speak, in multiple languages work better? Maybe this is something we could work on?
I have found out using live examples works best. I talked about wikipedia articles on subjects familiar to them (academic subject articles are an absolute no no in the beginning).
TASMAC being this one? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TASMAC If so, hehe. I completely see how it would interesting.
Also, how important does everyone see having say, ten or so, laptops and data cards to use is?
Best,
Gautam ________ http://social.prathambooks.org/
I completely agree with Bala's views.
I have done around 5 Wiki workshops and intentionally never used any Powerpoint presentation or handout though resource material were available in plenty. People get frozen with these resources and do not connect to the speaker well. I have seen anecdotes, story telling with some humour, content matching the locality / audience to work well. I use only very few screenshots to illustrate and use the LCD projector only when I give a demo of editing and take people for a Wikipedia site tour.
Basically, guys doing out reach need lot of passion for the movement and should learn few basic lessons in public speaking.
On Gautham's questions:
//Would 'Indian' videos, so to speak, in multiple languages work better? Maybe this is something we could work on?//
If we can have professionally done indic language videos ( or with subtitles at least ) for showing how to edit and explaining various features in Wikimedia project websites, then it can help.
//Also, how important does everyone see having say, ten or so, laptops and data cards to use is?//
More computers with internet access is always a plus. But it need not be a handicap. Many of our earlier workshops just had one laptop with net access which the speaker used to project. We had even used pre-recorded screencasts / screenshots when there were no online access.
When we have few computers we can have sessions and put few users per system to practice together.
Ravi
wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org