I was lucky enough to get to go to Arunachal Pradesh. One of my friends, could not go to the Northeast Regional Institute of Science and Technology (NERIST) so he recommended me instead. The NERIST wanted a speaker on Wikipedia and he recommended me for which I am deeply grateful. They sent me an air ticket and off I went....
Please read the complete writeup & images at :
http://thebutterflydiaries.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/outreach-in-itanagar/
-- Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur ------------------------------------------------------
"A very strong argument can be made for quitting presentations altogether and relying only on the internet. A number of students created their accounts."
I like this part! I don't think we can do away with presentations completely, but the presentations should never overshadow the live training aspect. I personally find presentations to limit conversations rather than keeping them open ended. This is specially true for when you are training potential new users.
"The next day’s session was on things geographical. Arun Ganesh dazzled the audience with OpenStreetMap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap and Quantum GIS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_GIS. Though the stuff was a bit difficult to cotton on to, the students did really well. At least six sets of students got the Java OpenStreetMap editor going, (quite a feat) and added road after road, building after building. To see the effects visit NERIST at Nirjuli on OpenStreetMap, just 20 kilometers east of Itanagar. The kids pretty much mapped up their whole campus that day. It was amazing to see the student’s lap up the tech stuff. Reminds us how much their inquisitive minds are deprived of genuine stimulation. They were truly awesome."
I liked this part too!
"The Victoria Memorial, Kolkata has been collaborating jointly with them to improve the Museum’s exhibits and the results are very evident."
The entire museum was being revamped last time when I was there. I hope they have made some progress since then.
I really think you should move full-time into training college students how to use Wikipedia, and I believe that would be an invaluable service not only to the Wikimedia community but the entire community of geeky people in the country. :)
Question: I see that the event was fairly successful, but would you consider discussing those elements that could have been better? This may include factors within your control and within the control of the organizers.
Best
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
I was lucky enough to get to go to Arunachal Pradesh. One of my friends, could not go to the Northeast Regional Institute of Science and Technology (NERIST) so he recommended me instead. The NERIST wanted a speaker on Wikipedia and he recommended me for which I am deeply grateful. They sent me an air ticket and off I went....
Please read the complete writeup & images at :
http://thebutterflydiaries.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/outreach-in-itanagar/
-- Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
Wikimedia-in-en mailing list Wikimedia-in-en@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-in-en
I had the good fortune of accompanying Ashwin, where I conducted workshops on the OpenStreetMap project [1]. It was a unique learning as well as a fun experience to do this along with him.
These kind of outreach efforts, especially to less connected areas like the northeast are extremely important and I hope more such events take place for the students of that region. From what we could gauge, the level of exposure to latest technological trends and especially the open source movement is fairly limited. There seems to be no form of tech community or any kind of activities taking place in the entire region with the possible exception of IIT Guwahati. It was particularly sad to see that such a large number of young and bright students who are so eager to learn have absolutely no one to mentor them on the possibilities out there with today's technology.
Ashwin and I managed to build a very good relationship with the students at both NERIST and NIT Arunachal Pradesh. Apart from the wikipedia and osm workshops, we also made sure we exposed the philosophies behind these open projects and what FOSS is all about. I feel its our responsibilities as ambassadors for these kind of projects to make sure that people can make the connect between sharing, openness and the subsequent impact that this has on each of our own lives, and not just limiting ourselves to 'how to edit wikipedia'.
My personal opinion is that our outreach efforts should be less about power point presentations and more about educating others on why we do this. After all I'm sure a good portion of us wikipedians who love what we do never learnt any of this by sitting through a lecture. We learnt it because we were curious and somewhere found some meaning in taking the effort to learn.
-Arun
PS: Is there any particular place where there is a collection of notes from the different wiki academies in India? One understands a lot by conducting these workshops and it would be nice if I could share that knowledge so someone who wants to do it for the first time can be prepared to the kind of questions and issues he will face. This will make it so much easier for more people to give talks in other places.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Planemad/Basic_cartography_workshop
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 1:50 PM, Ashwin Baindur ashwin.baindur@gmail.comwrote:
I was lucky enough to get to go to Arunachal Pradesh. One of my friends, could not go to the Northeast Regional Institute of Science and Technology (NERIST) so he recommended me instead. The NERIST wanted a speaker on Wikipedia and he recommended me for which I am deeply grateful. They sent me an air ticket and off I went....
Please read the complete writeup & images at :
http://thebutterflydiaries.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/outreach-in-itanagar/
-- Warm regards,
Ashwin Baindur
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l
On Apr 3, 2012, at 3:35 PM, Arun Ganesh wrote:
PS: Is there any particular place where there is a collection of notes from the different wiki academies in India? One understands a lot by conducting these workshops and it would be nice if I could share that knowledge so someone who wants to do it for the first time can be prepared to the kind of questions and issues he will face. This will make it so much easier for more people to give talks in other places.
Hi Arun
it's good point you make that we should have a central place where we put together notes from different sessions. Nitika has tried to put a central place for all outreach related stuff http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Handbook and there's some (though not as effectively as you are suggesting) inputs on sessions in it's associated talk page. Also, there's an interesting discussion thread here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Outreach_Programs.
Do share your inputs on any of these pages pls.
hisham
Most outreach sessions have a page on en.wiki/meta/wikimedia.in - there is a template that links most of the meetup/workshop/academy pages. Though each of these is supposed to have a report - a lot of the reports are sent to mailing lists and not added on wiki.
From: hisham@wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2012 09:36:21 +0530 To: wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org CC: wikimedia-in-en@lists.wikimedia.org; wikimedia-in-pun@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-IN-PUN] [Wikimediaindia-l] Outreach at Itanagar
On Apr 3, 2012, at 3:35 PM, Arun Ganesh wrote:
PS: Is there any particular place where there is a collection of notes from the different wiki academies in India? One understands a lot by conducting these workshops and it would be nice if I could share that knowledge so someone who wants to do it for the first time can be prepared to the kind of questions and issues he will face. This will make it so much easier for more people to give talks in other places.
Hi Arun it's good point you make that we should have a central place where we put together notes from different sessions. Nitika has tried to put a central place for all outreach related stuff http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Program/Outreach_Programs/Handbook and there's some (though not as effectively as you are suggesting) inputs on sessions in it's associated talk page. Also, there's an interesting discussion thread here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Program/Outreach_Programs. Do share your inputs on any of these pages pls. hisham
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