Wikimedia for schools workshop

This is a basic draft, not yet the product of consensus.

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

This is a syllabus for a training workshop that Wikimedians could deliver 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.

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 only need basic IT literacy; e.g. ability to use a web browser.
• Ideally, this workshop could be run in a room where everyone has access to networked computers. Depending on how the programme is adapted, however, it could be run with just a presentation computer.

Programme

• Overview (see #Goals of Wikipedia activity below)
• Basic facts and figures about Wikipedia and Wikimedia, including the Five Pillars and how vandalism gets reverted.
• Quality on Wikipedia: study of the evolution of an article, including how to view and interpret an article history.
• Activity: locating quality content (Featured Articles, Good Articles and Featured Media) in a subject of interest and comparing current and old versions.
• Discussion: how could the development and review of Wikipedia articles be discussed in the classroom?
• Potentially unsafe or unsuitable content on Wikipedia and Wikimedia.
• Activity: Wikipedia in your subject (see #The Wikipedia school below)
• Activity: Wikipedia outside the classroom (see #The Wikipedia day trip below)
• Other possible activities:
  • Logging in to Wikipedia and creating a user profile with links to articles, policies and media of interest
  • Creating a Wikipedia Book with selected quality content, using the Book Tool

Learner resources

Attendees at the session should be pointed towards these resources:

• Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool: Learning Objectives and Assignments Types on the Outreach Wiki

Trainer resources

These resources may be useful to the Wikimedia UK volunteer in running the workshop:

• Ambassadors Resources including slide decks and handouts on the basics of Wikipedia

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 point out - examples where the two groups have come up with essentially the same idea. When this happens, the two slips of paper 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 suggest 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 is written?" 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. Tick that box as soon as it's mentioned.
• For other connections, throw out prompts such as "Wikipedia is multilingual". Tick off the different departments as you find connections to Wikipedia. Here are some suggested connections:

Subject	Suggested classroom discussion
Modern languages	Compare different Wikipedias, or articles in different language versions. Can you find articles that are long and detailed in the other language, but short or scant in English? Are the different language versions translations of the same content, or are they separate creations?
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	WP:POINT|don't disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a