Wikimedia for schools workshop

This is a syllabus for a training workshop for teachers, learning designers and other staff, to introduce the various ways Wikimedia resources can help them in their work. It does not assume any prior knowledge of Wikimedia.

If you are looking for information about Wikimedia UK's work with schools, see education projects.

Objectives: participants will learn the principal facts about Wikipedia and Wikimedia, the breadth of ways they can be used educationally, and shall devise an outline of an activity for their subject.

Prerequisites

• No experience of contributing to Wikimedia projects is assumed.
• Participants should have basic IT literacy; e.g. ability to use a web browser.

Activities

Goals of Wikipedia

• Divide the room in two, and separate the two groups widely, ideally in separate rooms.
• Both groups have the task of coming up with a list of short responses. These should be written legibly on sheets of paper then which are stuck to a wall/board (post-it note might be too small to be legible in this context). Each group should use a different colour paper, or colour pen, so when their answers are brought together it's apparent at a glance which group they came from.
• Each group could be split into pairs or trios, each of which uses the time to come up with three answers. Report from each group and gather similar answers together.
• For one group, the question is, "What are the distinctive skills people need for work in the 21st Century?"
  • You can introduce this by showing an image of a factory or mill: the 19th Century workplace, and asking them to focus on how the modern world differs from that image.
• For other group, the question is, "What skills do people need to write, edit and illustrate an online encyclopedia for the world?"
  • You might prompt this by bringing up a Wikipedia article on the projector, but it might work better to talk about "an online encyclopedia" in the abstract, without mentioning Wikipedia.
• Monitor the discussions and steer them away from actual subjects. If they give answers such as "sciences, arts, humanities..." emphasise that the question is about skills needed.
• Hopefully, both groups will come up with suggestions such as:

Thinking, planning, reasoning	IT Skills: word processing	Critical thinking
Information skills: interpreting, assessing	Information skills: digesting, reporting	Creative/ original thinking
Writing accessibly	Attention to detail: reviewing and improving	Research skills
Working in a global environment: collaborating with people from different cultures, time zones, languages

• The two groups reassemble in front of one board. All the sheets of paper are put along the top and bottom of the board.
• Everybody looks for - and can shout out - examples where the two groups have come up with essentially the same point. When this happens, the two suggestions are moved to the middle of the board.
• Ideas that were offered only by the "modern workplace" group move to the left-hand edge of the board. Ideas that were offered only by the "online encyclopedia" group move to the right-hand edge.
• Looking at the pattern of ideas that emerges, elicit reflections. Did the participants anticipate how much overlap there would be? Do they see Wikipedia's role as relevant to the challenges they face as teachers? Did they see that relevance before?

The Wikipedia school

• On the whiteboard, make a schematic drawing of departments in a school. This could be just words in boxes, or you could be more artistic and make them look like buildings. Start with half a dozen boxes labelled "C&IT", "Modern Languages", "Religious studies" and your own suggestions, plus half a dozen other boxes that are blank.
• Ask the participants to shout out labels for the blank boxes: what departments do they have in their schools?
• Present them with the question (put it on a slide/ flip chart as well as reading it) "In which departments could pupils benefit from seeing how Wikipedia works?" Stress that this is a different question from "What can you learn about by reading Wikipedia?"
• An obvious answer is Information Technology/ C&IT/ whatever it's called. Put a big tick next to that box straight away.
• For other connections, throw out prompts such as "Wikipedia is multilingual". Here are some suggestions of connections that could be made:

Subject	Suggested classroom discussion
Modern languages	Compare different Wikipedias, or articles in different language versions. Can you find articles
Religious studies	Some language versions of Wikipedia's Muhammad article are illustrated with depictions of the Prophet: others aren't. (Be warned that the English version does contain classical depictions. The Arabic version does not.) Why is this? Should Wikipedia authors use depictions of the Prophet to illustrate the articles?
Humanities / general studies	Wikipedia is free and is part of creative commons. Wikimedia can only use material where there are appropriate rights. This is a way to introduce concepts of law, ownership, rights, and public benefit versus private benefit. Why does the law restrict the use of certain images and text to certain people? Why would people do things that benefit people they will never meet? Would you use Wikipedia differently if you had to pay to see each article?
Citizenship	Wikipedia has processes to undo vandalism or damage. What should count as vandalism? What should happen to people who vandalise? If you ran Wikipedia, how would you discourage vandalism in the first place? Should there be a democratic vote to decide which contributions to remove, and who to ban? (NB don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point)
Mathematics	Find a simple example of an equation, formula or numerical example: what alternative way of writing that equation or formula would be equivalent? What different numerical example would make the same point? For example, look at the equations and approximations in the article on the Rule of 72. Could the Wikipedia authors have written them in a different way? Would it help to rearrange the equations?
Art and Design	Images on Wikimedia are ideally expected to have aesthetic, technical and educational merit. What do these things mean in practice? If a photograph "lacks technical merit", what might be wrong with it? Look at the Featured Media of the Day on Commons, or the Featured Image of the Day on Wikipedia: why did the Wikimedia contributors select those images above others? Using image software or an online tool, can you make it more readable, more interesting to look at? Can you combine multiple images to shown something new?

• Elicit more of these suggestions and note them down, perhaps to develop further in a separate exercise.

The Wikipedia day-trip

• Collect ideas for "destinations for school trips/ days out". Write up at the front a list of locations, which might be places people have been or would like to go. These will be things like "a museum", "a historic town", "a zoo", "a stately home", "a city farm" or "a coastal path".
• Divide them into pairs and allocate each pair a location.
• Each pair has to make their suggestion specific. If they've been given "a museum", think of a named museum they might visit. If it's "the coast", think of a specific place.
• Each pair has to answer:
  • What things are there to look at in that place? In a nature reserve: plants, butterflies, birds. In a stately home: paintings of a historical figure, pieces of armour, servants' quarters. At a beach: shells, landmarks, the Sun's reflection on the water.
  • What could you use to expand pupils involvement in this trip, either in advance or afterwards?
    • Put up a slide reminding the room of the types of resource there are across Wikimedia: articles, maps, portraits, photographs, quotations, species facts, lists, timelines and so on.
  • What could pupils put into Wikimedia as a result of their visit? E.g. take a photograph and upload it to Commons; take a measurement of a geographical feature and add it to a Wikipedia article.
    • Show photographs from a similar educational project as a prompt.
• Get each pair to feed back the idea they have developed. If a pair is stuck on a difficult example, throw it open to the group and get suggestions.
• Back in pairs, they go online and work on developing their idea into an outline of a "treasure hunt" activity. In a document, they assemble a list things that pupils should look out for on the trip, with associated facts, questions, quotations or images drawn from Wikimedia projects.
• If possible, get them to email the draft to themselves, as a prompt to develop it after the workshop.