Education/Activities

Resources and Materials

Editing Wikipedia

Anyone is welcome to contribute to Wikipedia or its sister projects straight away, and there are resources to help you start. We can provide Markup guides/cheat sheets, Wikipedia Guides, guidance to contribute to Commons, and more.

Open Education Learning Platforms

We're working on open education for open platforms - like Mediawiki itself. Our VLE project is in technical development, and will provide a Wiki-moodle integration for fully Wiki-editable quiz delivery. We hope to develop a system of Open Badges (see also here). You might also be interested in Wikiversity. Moodle and WikiSoba. Badges & Mediawiki analytics. See also Wikiversity below. This could have its own sub-portal.

Digital Literacy materials

Being able to use Wikipedia and its sister projects involves a certain set of literacies. Understanding a Wikipedia article doesn't just involve being able to read; it involves understanding source credibility, being able to evaluate evidence and weigh up conflicting evidence, and understanding how different concepts are connected.

Editing Wikipedia is one great way to engage these skills - selecting good sources, balancing notable claims, organising articles and linking to other ones, interacting with other editors and their perspectives are all fundamental. We are developing digital literacy lesson suggestions, including the one sentence microcosm. If you'd like to get involved check out the digital literacy discussions here.

Teaching students how to edit: Wikipedia Assignments

Contributing to Wikipedia and the sister projects teaches students valuable skills of information literacy, in particular high quality writing skills, critical evaluation, research, and citation. It also gives students a sense of purpose in their work, and creates free content that can be developed by others. Many universities are already assigning students to improve Wikipedia articles for credit. The PDF brochure includes many case studies.

Want to teach others how to edit?

If you think you could teach other people how to edit we'd love to hear from you! Get in touch over on the For trainers pages and explore how we can support you.

Education conference

In 2012 and 2013, Wikimedia UK ran Wikimedia-focused Education conferences. With international representation the conferences considered a whole spectrum of educational contexts, including Wikipedia for kids, photojournalism, the transition from school to university and more detail about running Wikipedia university assignments. EduWiki Conference 2014 is in preparation for November.

Wikimania 2014

Wikimania 2014 in London includes a stream on the Future of Education.

Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador

Wikimedia UK is working with Jisc to deliver a nine month project from July 2013 to March 2014, to encourage a range of audiences (librarians, teachers, researchers and students) within learning and research to engage with Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia projects for mutual benefit. This includes a programme of workshops in institutions on "Wikimedia: linking research impact and open education".

Student societies

Imperial College, London attracted national attention as the first UK university to have a Wikipedia student society. The students organised a day event to explore relations between Wikipedia and academia. The Cambridge University Wikipedia Society has also been quite active since 2012. We have also experimented with a fresher fair stall at the University of Warwick and found it an excellent way of gathering interest from enthusiastic undergraduates.

Our student societies page explains how we can help students get a society under way.

See more education activities

Other education activities

Campus wikilounges

University of Manchester and University of Liverpool are among the institutions where Wikimedia volunteers have provided "Wikilounge" events, helping students make informed use of Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Outreach Ambassador

University of Bristol has supported a unique paid internship to explore co-working between Wikimedia UK and a university. One outcome was a Wikimedia Girl Geek Dinner hosted at the university, involving students, lecturers and the broader public.

Wikiversity

Lecturers at University of Exeter (Economics Classroom Experiments) and University of Westminster (Political Simulation and Gaming) are among those using Wikiversity as a learning platform or to share good practice with their colleagues.

Student inductions and wiki-literacy

Alex Stinson from the United States explains the Campus Ambassador programme at a workshop in the University of Bristol, 19 March 2011

It is important that students and pupils understand the limitations of Wikipedia (and encyclopaedias in general) as well as its usefulness. The Wikimedia community have created many resources to explain the basic concepts of reliability, neutrality and Wikipedia's internal review processes. Wikimedia UK can provide material for student inductions (Contact us).

Science learning centres

Our work with the UK Association of Science & Discovery Centres includes a keynote at their Marketing Managers Conference and a half-day workshop at Science Learning Centre South West.

Advisory bodies

Wikimedia UK is forming links with national advisory bodies to make sure that relevant information about the Wikimedia projects is available to teaching staff, support staff and educational developers. For example, the JISC Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards has a guide to Wikimedia Commons as a platform for Open Educational Resources.

University Wikimedians in Residence

Wikimedia UK is working up a draft job description for /University Wikimedian in Residence and aims to establish these soon.