[Wikimediaau-l] It pays to speak up!

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi,

I have some cool news.

On the weekend I spoke at a LinuxChix event called a "microconf",
which had speakers and audiences video-linked between Sydney and
Melbourne. It was a great day with a really diverse range of speakers
who all had something great to say. The video of my talk is here:
<http://brianna.modernthings.org/article/155/video-from-aussiechix-microconf-wikipedia-the-education-system>

When I submitted to speak at it I put down "Wikipedia & the education
system" along with a couple of other potential talks, and when that
one was accepted I realised I didn't have a strong single argument
that I wanted to make. So I made my talk less formal in that way, and
more throwing out ideas about how Wikipedia & education would have to
work together in the future. I got a lot of compliments from people
saying it was really interesting and had made connections they had
never thought about before. This is the thing, if I had given the talk
to Wikipedians it would have pretty much been dead-boring, telling
them things they already knew. So I think it's really important for us
to communicate what we know about Wikipedia, Wikimedia, wikis and free
culture, to other people, who don't necessarily have a reason to make
those connections.

As it happened one of the attendees was an educator and another was a
daughter of an educator. The first one asked if I would be interested
in giving an online workshop through https://me.edu.au/ The second one
showed her mother the video of my talk, and her mother asked if I
would be interested in doing a workshop at a VCAL conference. (VCAL is
an alternative to the VCE, the Victorian year 12 certificate.) And
because of my ACEC talk, I was prompted to submit something to the
VITTA conference (Victorian IT teachers). That LinuxChix microconf had
less than 30 attendees!

I found out about the ACEC conference by random web surfing, but all
the others are because I have talked to people or written on my blog.
Otherwise finding out what is going on inside the big world of
education is very difficult, for people who are not a part of that
world.

So I guess my point is just that there actually is quite a lot of
interest in the education world about Wikipedia, and that the best way
for us to get into it is by talking to people. And it doesn't have to
be heaps of people. Start anywhere and you may be surprised by the
connections that will be made. And just by speaking even to five
people about it, you start to do the explicit logical thinking that is
necessary for a strong argument... and that makes your next talk that
much better.

Hm, maybe we should create a mailing list that educators can join?
education-l at lists.wikimedia.org.au ? (note explicitly Australian
context, as formal education is still tied to state- or
institution-based standards)

cheers
Brianna

-- 
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/