[Wikimediaau-l] SFD, ACEC, LCA

Fri Oct 10 08:47:59 UTC 2008

Great work, Brianna! It's great you're out there talking about
Wikipedia and fielding questions.

The types of questions got me thinking though. Obviously people are
already very familiar with Wikipedia. I'd like to see use that more to
our advantage. Instead of "educating" people about Wikipedia (who
already see it every day), it would be good to also work with them on
their issues, and facilitate solutions. It's a different style of
learning and presenting, but it seems appropriate.

For example, you're in a room full (or not so full) of teachers. One
asks how to deal with 3rd graders using Wikipedia uncritically. And
somehow you're the one who's meant to have the answer? Even if you do
have an answer (like using schools-wikipedia.org which I have to say I
had never heard of before) I'm sure there'd be others who have had to
deal with the same problem sitting in audience already with other
ideas. The person presenting shouldn't feel they're the one who has to
have all the answers.

I think it'd be great if we could start using techniques of
"facilitating" (yes, that word) which can engage the audience and
lessen the burden of the instructor, and help everyone learn more.
It'd be good to look at moving towards having us facilitate as much as
presenting.

The only reference for this style of teaching I can find online is The
Change Agency < http://www.thechangeagency.org/ >, which deals with
activists group. But active, facilitated learning (as opposed to
passive lecturing) is really the cornerstone of modern education
theory. Starting with the audience's own experiences is really the
only way to teach. (and yes, I consider giving a presentation to be
"teaching")

So anyway, in sum up my ramblings, I think what Brianna's doing is
great! (Please don't take this as criticism) I also think it'd be good
if we started doing some "active learning" (which I might also call:
facilitating, radical education, constructivist learning, or just
"modern education theory" but I can't find any wiki article on the
general concepts.)

I don't expect anyone to change styles overnight. There's theory and
skills to learn. But if people are interested in the idea of using
more audience-engaging styles of presentation, I'd like to get a
workshop together or maybe find a trainer (facilitator) for people who
want to be Wikimedia presenters. Is there interest in this?

And lastly, I know we have a great list of activities, but it would
good to start drawing on the wider community for what they want,
rather than telling them what they need.

Peter Halasz.

To give you a bit more of an idea, the change agency has these bullet points...

"The educational principles and practices (or pedagogy) that guide our
work include:"

	experiential and empowered learning
	listening and reflection
	mentorship
	questioning, not telling
	exercises linked to real and contemporary change work
	building a 'container' or learning environment characterised by
trust, openness, honesty, self-critique, mutual respect and support.

On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 1:26 AM, Brianna Laugher
<brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Some recent stuff:
>
> 1- Software Freedom Day. I went to the Melbourne event.
> <http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/141/melbournes-software-freedom-day>
> I gave a short talk about Wikimedia and its relation to free software
> (ie via two ways - use/development of it, and inspiration from
> ideals).
>
> The venue it was held at, "The Hub @ Docklands", is a really great
> venue. A short walk from Southern Cross station. A decent size, a
> modern building filled with light and a good kitchen. CHEAP!
> Apparently SFD's hosting was $88 for the day. If(when) we ever hold
> anything event-like in Melbourne I would really consider this place.
> There is a great open space
> (<http://flickr.com/photos/pfctdayelise/2878089237/>) and a good room
> for holding structured talks.
>
> I also had some great discussion with Kathy Reid and Ben Balbo, who
> are connected to Melb BarCamp and the Melb PHP group. I mentioned how
> we might like to encourage MediaWiki development, and Ben encouraged
> me to give a talk on MediaWiki at one of their PHP meetings. I am a
> bit hesitant about this because all the PHP I've ever learned is only
> because of MediaWiki, and I really know jack about squat, but if it is
> just an intro thing it might be a good learning experience for me too.
>
> And then we were talking about the BarCamp (I think it will be
> March-ish) and Ben said he wanted to have some project hacking as part
> of the event (they want it to be a weekend-long thing), and said the
> project they work on could be some MediaWiki extension. I was pretty
> blown away by this generous and immediate offer of support. To be fair
> to people who know other languages I suggested another cool thing
> might be to get people to work on using the MediaWiki API to do
> interesting things, as I feel it is a deeply under-utilised API,
> considering the richness of data in Wikimedia (and the free
> licenses!). There is MediaWiki API support code for a number of
> languages so you don't have to know PHP to use it which is nice.
> <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Client_Code>
>
> So I will keep in touch with Ben and see if we can get some Melbourne
> hackers exposed to/interested in MediaWiki code one way or another.
>
> SFD was also interesting because even though it wasn't super-well
> attended by the general public, I think it was actually useful for
> supporting the existing people in the community just as a kind of
> "getting back to ideals" thing, remembering why you're there and why
> you care about the topic. I have found the free software community in
> Australia to be very supportive and encouraging. We would do well to
> emulate them. :)
>
> 2- Australian Computers in Education Conference. This is a conference
> held every two years in a different city each time. It's pretty huge,
> and really quite professional. I gave a talk about Wikipedia in
> schools. I covered Wikipedia basics (ie encyclopedia, website, not for
> profit, multilingual, wiki/community, and free content), some tools
> for analysing article histories, what different types of projects
> might be relevant, and finally the inclusion of Wikipedia in the HSC
> English (NSW) curriculum. There's links and slides (and some audio I
> recorded after I got back!) all on here:
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise/Safe_wiki>
>
> I will give a presentation at VITTA (Victorian IT Teachers Assoc) in
> late November basically on the same topic, except (1) it will be
> hands-on, in a computer lab - woot! and (2) I won't need to talk about
> the HSC. So I would really appreciate it if anyone has a listen/look
> at the stuff and if you think I missed something worth mentioning
> please bring it up.
>
> Back to ACEC, my talk was not super well attended, but with 14
> simultaneous streams I was not too concerned!
>
> I had two questions afterwards - one was from a teacher whose school
> had an article. She said sometimes the article was vandalised but
> before she could fix it it would already have been fixed, and she
> wanted to know who those people were. (I talked about RC patrol.)
> Another was from a teacher who asked what to do for grades 3-6 kids
> who use Wikipedia unquestioningly. For students this age it is a bit
> harder to know what to do, because they're probably a bit young to do
> the whole critical thinking thing. I didn't have any good ideas. Does
> anyone?
>
> Later I also had a NZ teacher come up and say she got lots of good
> info from my talk, which was very gratifying! She asked how she could
> make contact with Wikipedians in NZ and I showed her WP:NZWPNB (an
> extrapolation on my part, based on WP:AWNB, which luckily held :)).
>
> There was basically one other talk which went into detail about wikis,
> by John Turner from PLC in Melbourne
> <http://www.acec2008.info/confpapers/paperdetails.asp?pid=7522&docid=822>
> e.g. http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com/About+Us . So that is just
> using wikis, not Wikipedia. He was cool, I mean he's lucky to be the
> head IT guy in a pretty progressive school I gather, but still cool! I
> talked to him afterwards and we could perhaps invite ourselves to his
> school to check out what they're doing one day, if we wanted.
> I think we should collect examples of wiki-related classroom projects
> that have happened in Australia, to help make it more concrete and
> realistic for educators.
>
> Finally I caught up with Pru Mitchell of edna.edu.au which was great.
> (They are a semi-government federal education group that kind of
> exists to facilitate and support education-y stuff across state
> borders... I think.) They have been very supportive of us (providing
> our incorp meeting conference call) so I was very pleased to meet Pru
> and find out a bit more about what they do. They had a stall in the
> exhibition thingy (most of the other stalls were commercial software
> providers) and offered to hand out fliers for us. I kicked myself for
> not taking any with me, then! But they will be at VITTA too and with
> any luck I will remember to bring some with me that time.
>
> (And for lulz I spent some time talking to the salesperson at the
> Encyclopedia Britannica stall. :))
>
> 3- Good news, my proposal for a "Free as in Freedom" miniconf at
> linux.conf.au (late Jan 2009, Hobart) was accepted! (Miniconf speakers
> don't get the perks of main-conference speakers -- they have to pay to
> attend, so it's only a good idea if you were kinda planning to go
> anyway.) I will write and send out a CfP very soon. Wikimedia-related
> topics will naturally be super appropriate!
>
> whew...
>
> cheers,
> Brianna
>
> --
> They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
> http://modernthings.org/
>
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