[Wikimediaindia-l] Death and Post-mortem of Indian Education Program pilot

[Sue Gardner]

On 13 November 2011 08:46, Bishakha Datta <bishakhadatta at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 5:58 AM, Shiju Alex <shijualexonline at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Another strategy that we can adopt while doing this program in India is,
>> about the selection of articles for editing. We can ask students to
>> contribute to articles that they are interested in, rather than of all of
>> them editing the articles on the same topic.
>>
> This is related to something I've been thinking about.
>
> As conceived, the IEP and its parent the PPP (pardon the acronyms), were
> about contributing to wikipedia, about learning how to contribute, and about
> having fun while learning.


Hi Bishakha,

This is a bit of a derail from your e-mail, but I wanted to clarify
your use of the past tense (they *were* about contributing). I think
the thread title here may be creating some confusion about what has
actually happened. That, or else I may be confused myself :-)

The PPI (or PPP, LOL) is indeed over. It concluded with the completion
of the Stanton grant requirements, and has now evolved into the GEP,
the Global Education Program. The IEP as I understand it is not over:
contrary to the subjectline of this thread, it hasn't "died." A number
of schools have participated in the pilot phase of the IEP. My
understanding is that the project has been mostly successful, except
for one school, or set of schools, at which there were serious
problems with plagiarism that, despite repeated efforts, the team
couldn't get resolved.

The plagiarism problems were serious, and after their efforts to fix
them didn't work, Hisham and Barry shut down that stream of the
project. It was a hard decision to make, but I expect there's general
agreement that it was the right decision. But the project itself is
not over. Although, the pilot phase might be over: I'm not sure about
that.

I'm just clarifying this point because I think it would be good for
everybody here to have the same basic understanding of what happened.
And if I'm wrong, somebody might please just correct me :-)

Thanks,
Sue




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