I can see five broad ways we can try and engage in education. The diversity of possibilities is great but it means that it's difficult to take a structured approach: each of these things needs a proper working group or task force, and effort on many fronts, in order to have a chance of success. Hence I welcome the list’s input on how we should focus. If we can get a small group of people with ideas and contacts in each area, that would be fantastic. So, five areas: 

* Secondary education: get schools using the projects in their educational activities, as Ollie Bray talked about in his keynote at the AGM. This could include projects with content outputs, such as QR-tagging a museum or documenting local geography. There are very broad possibilities here.

* Adult education, as proposed by Roger (I agree with WSC that we should promote “contributing” rather than “creating articles”)

* Higher education practice: get a Campus Ambassador programme working in UK universities. Knock on effects: student Wikipedia societies; Wikipedia assignments getting accepted as teaching practice; big improvements to swathes of WP articles on difficult academic subjects.

* Higher education: get Wikimedia projects recognized by universities as a platform for disseminating and archiving content, whether for teaching or research. Convince funders and projects that we can take care of their content, and give it exposure, at least as well as they can.

* Higher education: get university courses using Wikiversity as a platform, thereby improving WV and opening up educational practice.

I work in HE, and I’ve made that a priority. Apologies, but with adult education I’ve not got past some exploratory emails. The body for this sector was Lifelong Learning UK, but that was wound up earlier this year. NIACE (www.niace.org.uk) seems the most relevant body. Finding an enthusiast in a relevant local or national body would be a way to break through to many tutors around the country.

There is a working group for the Campus Ambassador project and Alex has been great at pushing this forward, including putting out the call for CA applicants. We are taking the sustainability of this project seriously. There are more people who can and will be involved, but I’m not sure how to how to co-ordinate this with the other activities.

In the area of getting universities using us as a content platform, Fae and I are talking to funding bodies and things are moving in a positive direction. We’re aiming not just to arrange events with these organisations, but to affect strategy in a lasting way. In the last few weeks I’ve spoken at the Open Educational Resource conference and, as another way to reach out to that community, created this document for CETIS, which provides advice to the whole sector:

http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Wikimedia_Commons_for_UKOER_resources

There’s a lot more to be done in terms of reaching out to individual projects and teaching support units.

Dealing with universities and national educational bodies, we face a similar environment to working with museums and libraries, in that there’s financial and organisational turmoil, and a large proportion of teaching support colleagues in my university and nationally are in some sort of redundancy or job reallocation process. This doesn’t prevent WMUK doing what we want to do, but slows the process and means people have time for us than we would have a couple of years ago.

Higher Education and WV: Leutha is keen on this and I think there are things I can do to help. In terms of affecting teaching practice, there are publications and projects we can target.

Schools: I understand Steve V. has a good relationship with a Bristol primary school as a result of Jimmy’s visit back in January, and we have other school educators in our community.
 

What would help now, with all these areas, is if people on this list respond to me in private email about what goals they can help us work towards, and I assemble a plan with next steps and who can do them. I envisage a whole area of the WMUK site about our work with education, but before I do that I need to audit what we can reasonably aim to do, rather than make promises we can’t deliver on.

If you've read this long email, you've proved sufficient dedication to the cause. ;)

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 10:17 PM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas <at> googlemail.com> wrote:

Roger,

Would be interested to see if Martin made any progress with that. I have to submit lesson plans next week so hopefully might have something of my own to contribute by then. 

Pitching this stuff is hard; kids at different ages see things differently, and kids in different areas age at different speeds.

On the other matter; you're clearly way more experienced at this teaching lark than me :) but personally I find that this is the sort of thing that is best taught by "doing". One thing I did with on old teaching group (last year) was set up a cloned wiki with some content copied from Wikipedia and got them to edit it over the course of a few sessions (including collaborating using talk pages etc.) One of the biggest problems with new editors is helping them understand the eco-system.

Tom

On 1 June 2011 22:36, Roger Bamkin <victuallers <at> gmail.com> wrote:

Two minor threads: Martin Poulter and I discussed how we could put together a teaching plan so that someone like yourself could organise an enevening course in "creating your own wiki page" ... not sure whether Martin made any progress. I know he was investigating ... I suspect there are a lot of people who would like to put their local history work into Wikipedia ... if we just explained it and demo ed it at the same time.

 

Other thread. I teach secondary ICT. I'm planning to teach intro to Wiki editting next week. I have still to find some resources. Any help appreciated.

 

regards

Roger B

On 1 June 2011 17:34, Alex Stinson <stinsoad <at> dukes.jmu.edu> wrote:

There is an education list at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education which appears to be one of the better ways to contact people because not everyone regularly checks outreach wiki (including myself). I invite people to join who want to work with Education and Wikimedia projects, it include a fair number of Campus Ambassadors who are doing innovative stuff at universities as well as a number of other people in various chapters involved in education stuffs,

Alex

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 5:29 PM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas <at> googlemail.com> wrote:

Hey Alex,

Yes a lot of that has been my starting point. FWIW there is a lack of content for the younger age groups (say 14-16) which is where my current focus is; the "beginner" guides are more suited (at least in my experience of teaching) to older students. I'd also like to see some more material on the goals/ideals of Wikipedia (as that seems a better start point before leaping into account creation :)).

Also I noticed that a lot of the focus is on editing or contributing Wikipedia. I've approached this from a slightly different perspective - which is that most of the kids I will be talking to aren't interested in writing (and probably aren't yet capable of doing so) a Wikipedia article. On the other hand I aim to teach them about using WP as a resource (and the potential pitfalls) as well as trying to get them to treat it with respect (i.e. quit the vandalism).

Is there a place on Outreach where discussion of education/teaching materials is happening?

Tom

On 1 June 2011 17:15, Alex Stinson <stinsoad <at> dukes.jmu.edu> wrote:

"High school professors." Yikes! Meant teachers, not professors. I thought I fixed that in a second read. Been working with universities for too long.

Tom, that sounds like something that could really use some development in the way of documented techniques or presenting the information. You may want to check out the stuff on the Wikimedia Foundation bookshelf project for materials you can destribute instead of making all of them yourself (http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Bookshelf). We also have been developing a fair amount of stuff at the education portal on outreach, though still a work in progress (http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education). Alot has already been developed in fairly professional ways, it just needs to be applied in the class room,

Alex

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 5:01 PM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas <at> googlemail.com> wrote:

Chris, 

Yes, that was my impression too - I have some ideas/proposals to try and bring into play but didn't want to step on top of an active project that I'd missed :P

I'm based in Lincolnshire.

Alex,

I've been keeping a close eye on the Ambassadors project - it looks like some great work (yet another reason to wish I was a student again :)). Expanding that into schools is a major project, but one that I think would net us some massive gains long term. I'd be really interested in hearing about your work with the high school professors.

In general:

I've been interested in education for a while; I'm a scout leader here & my parents have their own business doing educational visits to schools on the topic of astronomy (so I have fairly extensive experience of that sort of "business model"). The reason I have a specific interest now is that I've been approached to look at doing an evening class on computers and the internet at a local secondary school. One of the topics I want to cover is Wikipedia and WP editing.

I could put together some teaching material & release it for others to use on an ad-hoc basis, but I think there is loads more we could expand into if WMUK were behind it - stuff like working with the teaching bodies to get WP recognised as a resource, and perhaps even worked into the curriculum (at the very least work with them to provide useful material for teachers/students about Wikipedia). In fact, something like the training events Cancer Research people (but for teachers) would be really interesting to explore.

Another off-hand idea; it would be great to try and team up with some of the GLAM institutions to run educational days (i.e. have groups of kids turn up to learn about stuff using local and Wikipedia content, and to get an introduction to Wikipedia).

And more; we could use WMUK resources to train up and support Wikipedia volunteers who want to go into the classroom  - because teaching kids can be damned hard!

There's a lot to focus on, but I think it is one of our most important outreach areas in the UK.

Tom

On 1 June 2011 16:40, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki <at> gmail.com> wrote:

I think it's been hibernating for a while. I haven't heard it mentioned at all since the new Board took office.

Of course, if someone wants to pick up the ball and run with it, that would be very welcome. Whereabouts are you, Tom?

Regards,

Chris

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Thomas Morton <morton.thomas <at> googlemail.com> wrote:

Hey all,

What is the status of our work with schools/education? http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Schools_project seems to be a little stagnant, there are references to other School interactions on the Wiki (including a link to a hidden office page about the educational budget).

Is any of this still active?

I only ask because I've been approached locally to do some in-school work relating to Wikipedia and it occurred to me that this is a major area we could be focusing on.

I've got a decent amount of experience working with children, schools and educators and it would be great to contribute that on a wider scale.

If none of those projects are particularly active, would anyone be interested in working on this (including volunteering to go into schools and youth groups)?

Tom / ErrantX

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Chris, what I understand by schools outreach is getting the educational benefits of WM projects into schools - via teachers. Hence still an adult audience.

There is a lot of interesting stuff here... I've been swamped with email the last few days and only just catching up so bear with me :D