Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Wikimedia in the Classroom (Queensland project)
That seems to be a very solid presentation, most of my teachers I have seem to be reasonably adept at being able to use Wikipedia and understand how to make sure an article is accurate and the usefulness of it as a spring board to other references. That said, I know there are teachers out there who are incredibly anti-Wikipedia and a presentation like this could go a long way into being able to get teachers to understand what Wikipedia is and isn't. Best of luck with your project. On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Craig Franklin cr...@halo-17.net wrote: Okay, it looks like the the Wiki has been fixed, so here goes: Over the past few months, a few of us up here in Brisbane have been developing a programme and materials to do presentations to teachers and schools. It's been our observation that while many teachers have negative views about Wikipedia, these can be fairly easily dispelled by standing in front of them and talking about who we are, what we do, and putting some misconceptions right. It's also a good way to showcase our lesser-known projects; while most know Wikipedia, they don't know about Wiktionary and Wikisource, even though those can be valuable resources as well. I've placed a PDF of the most recent presentation we did up on the chapter site. The thumbnails don't appear to work, but if you click on the filename you can download a complete PDF of my Powerpoint: http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Overview_Presentation_For_Sc hools.pdf Our first presentation was in early April at Redcliffe State High School. Feedback was very positive and once we sat down and talked Wiki for an hour, the teachers wanted to get involved with either using our content, or doing projects which would involve working collaboratively with us. I'll sum up the exact feedback in a future mail, but when they thought about it they also had a lot of ideas that I think are quite exciting and I'd be interested in going further with. The challenges I can see in the future is finding more places to do the presentation (we are lucky to have a member of the chapter who is a teacher at said school), and following up effectively and quickly on teacher ideas. The other issue I suppose I have is that I'm only one man, I have a fulltime job, and generally speaking pupil-free days are the only time when we can do these, which limits us to a handful of events a year. This can be dealt with by either convincing teachers and educators to come to night classes, or training up other people who can take time off work or whatever to go and do the presentation. Anyway, feel free to have a look at the presentation slides and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have at this stage. Cheers, Craig -Original Message- From: wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sarah Ewart Sent: Wednesday, 5 May 2010 8:50 PM To: Wikimedia-au Subject: Re: [Wikimediaau-l] grants application this year? Craig, please, please, please do write up on the wiki what you've been doing. I think it's very important for the chapter's health to see what members are achieving in their local communities. On 5/5/10, Craig Franklin cr...@halo-17.net wrote: Well, there's stuff going on. My little Wikipedia in the Classroom project has been boiling away pretty nicely (I really ought to update the page on the chapter site about that.), but it's mainly foundation-building stuff that'll let us pull of bigger things in the future. And as for grants, again, the outlay for my project has been about $20 so far, which included my petrol to drive to the venues and to purchase some mints to hand out. You don't need a big fat grant to pull off something worthwhile. Cheers, Craig From: wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of private musings Sent: Wednesday, 5 May 2010 7:30 PM To: Wikimedia-au Subject: Re: [Wikimediaau-l] grants application this year? 'Grant applications are serious, not something that you submit just to engage with a process and there needs to be a properly thought through application with an idea of who, what, when, where and how the proposed project will be run' - totally agree with this- and agree that it's a large stretch to try and get anything completed before the deadline - whether or not it's worth trying is a different question, I guess :-) 'I'd rather see us take the time to discuss possible ideas properly and get the details of any proposed projects members want to run nutted out as carefully as possible before submitting applications' - totally agree with this too - again, it does seem unlikely to be able to get this all done ahead of the deadline - I guess I wish discussions and activity had kicked off earlier - though that's largely down to us as
Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Wikimedia in the Classroom (Queensland project)
Excellent job Craig - it's a great model for member-driven outreach projects and I wish you the best of luck. The issue with being able to present stuff to people who work (or are available) 9-5 in work time is always a challenge - it's one we hit with unrelated projects in Perth. (replying to Craig and Bryce) People fear what they don't understand - and we're competing for air with a media that (with some notable exceptions) loves to predict our demise and overstate internal dramas on the project. Also as Craig says many teachers don't even know the other projects exist, and those may be of direct use to them in other ways. kindest regards Andrew On 10 May 2010 17:15, Bryce Roney br...@bryceroney.com wrote: That seems to be a very solid presentation, most of my teachers I have seem to be reasonably adept at being able to use Wikipedia and understand how to make sure an article is accurate and the usefulness of it as a spring board to other references. That said, I know there are teachers out there who are incredibly anti-Wikipedia and a presentation like this could go a long way into being able to get teachers to understand what Wikipedia is and isn't. Best of luck with your project. On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Craig Franklin cr...@halo-17.net wrote: Okay, it looks like the the Wiki has been fixed, so here goes: Over the past few months, a few of us up here in Brisbane have been developing a programme and materials to do presentations to teachers and schools. It's been our observation that while many teachers have negative views about Wikipedia, these can be fairly easily dispelled by standing in front of them and talking about who we are, what we do, and putting some misconceptions right. It's also a good way to showcase our lesser-known projects; while most know Wikipedia, they don't know about Wiktionary and Wikisource, even though those can be valuable resources as well. I've placed a PDF of the most recent presentation we did up on the chapter site. The thumbnails don't appear to work, but if you click on the filename you can download a complete PDF of my Powerpoint: http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Overview_Presentation_For_Sc hools.pdfhttp://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Overview_Presentation_For_Schools.pdf Our first presentation was in early April at Redcliffe State High School. Feedback was very positive and once we sat down and talked Wiki for an hour, the teachers wanted to get involved with either using our content, or doing projects which would involve working collaboratively with us. I'll sum up the exact feedback in a future mail, but when they thought about it they also had a lot of ideas that I think are quite exciting and I'd be interested in going further with. The challenges I can see in the future is finding more places to do the presentation (we are lucky to have a member of the chapter who is a teacher at said school), and following up effectively and quickly on teacher ideas. The other issue I suppose I have is that I'm only one man, I have a fulltime job, and generally speaking pupil-free days are the only time when we can do these, which limits us to a handful of events a year. This can be dealt with by either convincing teachers and educators to come to night classes, or training up other people who can take time off work or whatever to go and do the presentation. Anyway, feel free to have a look at the presentation slides and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have at this stage. Cheers, Craig -Original Message- From: wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Sarah Ewart Sent: Wednesday, 5 May 2010 8:50 PM To: Wikimedia-au Subject: Re: [Wikimediaau-l] grants application this year? Craig, please, please, please do write up on the wiki what you've been doing. I think it's very important for the chapter's health to see what members are achieving in their local communities. On 5/5/10, Craig Franklin cr...@halo-17.net wrote: Well, there's stuff going on. My little Wikipedia in the Classroom project has been boiling away pretty nicely (I really ought to update the page on the chapter site about that.), but it's mainly foundation-building stuff that'll let us pull of bigger things in the future. And as for grants, again, the outlay for my project has been about $20 so far, which included my petrol to drive to the venues and to purchase some mints to hand out. You don't need a big fat grant to pull off something worthwhile. Cheers, Craig From: wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of private musings Sent: Wednesday, 5 May 2010 7:30 PM To: Wikimedia-au Subject: Re: [Wikimediaau-l] grants application this year? 'Grant applications are serious, not something
Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Wikimedia in the Classroom (Queensland project)
Hi Bryce, Thanks for your feedback. I must say that that hasn't particularly been my experience with teachers, the usual response is along the lines of Oh, Wikipedia, isn't that the site where anyone can write anything? Nobody in the group I presented to was overtly anti-Wikipedia (or if they were, they kept it to themselves), but they did have what we would consider to be fairly basic questions about how we deal with vandalism, how reliable we are, etc etc. Obviously it would be good if we can calm some of the irrational fears of the anti-Wikipedia people and bring them around to our side, which is a definite goal for me of the whole project. Another point that they were generally speaking unaware of was the open licensing nature of everything we do, there was a few quiet 'Wow!'s in the room when I mentioned that. We even had one guy who knew quite a bit about the concepts of open source software who wasn't aware that Wikipedia was under CC-BY-SA. And of course, they didn't know about any of our projects except Wikipedia (although someone thought that WikiAnswers was one of ours). With that said, they did seem fairly uninterested in the bit about featured content and audited content and whatnot, while it's a good barometer of how far along the project is progressing, they didn't seem to see how that was relevant to what they did as educators. On the other hand, they did like me going over categories and the other technical doodads (it's not in the presentation, but we dropped out at that point for a bit and I started navigating around the site itself) - even if they were somewhat aware of these features I think they liked having someone who was in the know explain how it all worked. The next presentation I do will probably take that into account and I'll probably replace slides 24 through 26 with a simpler explanation of the article grading scale (ie: FA, GA, B, C, Start, Stub), and spend more time talking about possible ways they can actually work with us; because that seemed to be something they were VERY interested in. In short though, I think being able to stand in front of them in a classroom and talk Wiki for an hour showed that we're not just a two bit website staffed by antisocial nerds, and made us look a bit more solid and trustworthy. Being out there and doing these presentations might yet turn out to be more important than the actual content of the presentations. Cheers, Craig F. PS: I'm CCing this to the members list, simply because I know there are some people who are on one mailing list but not the other. Feel free both to jump in and discuss! From: wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediaau-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bryce Roney Sent: Monday, 10 May 2010 7:16 PM To: Wikimedia-au Subject: Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Wikimedia in the Classroom (Queensland project) That seems to be a very solid presentation, most of my teachers I have seem to be reasonably adept at being able to use Wikipedia and understand how to make sure an article is accurate and the usefulness of it as a spring board to other references. That said, I know there are teachers out there who are incredibly anti-Wikipedia and a presentation like this could go a long way into being able to get teachers to understand what Wikipedia is and isn't. Best of luck with your project. On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Craig Franklin cr...@halo-17.net wrote: Okay, it looks like the the Wiki has been fixed, so here goes: Over the past few months, a few of us up here in Brisbane have been developing a programme and materials to do presentations to teachers and schools. It's been our observation that while many teachers have negative views about Wikipedia, these can be fairly easily dispelled by standing in front of them and talking about who we are, what we do, and putting some misconceptions right. It's also a good way to showcase our lesser-known projects; while most know Wikipedia, they don't know about Wiktionary and Wikisource, even though those can be valuable resources as well. I've placed a PDF of the most recent presentation we did up on the chapter site. The thumbnails don't appear to work, but if you click on the filename you can download a complete PDF of my Powerpoint: http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Overview_Presentation_For_Sc http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Overview_Presentation_For_S c%0d%0ahools.pdf hools.pdf Our first presentation was in early April at Redcliffe State High School. Feedback was very positive and once we sat down and talked Wiki for an hour, the teachers wanted to get involved with either using our content, or doing projects which would involve working collaboratively with us. I'll sum up the exact feedback in a future mail, but when they thought about it they also had a lot of ideas that I think are quite exciting and I'd be interested in going further with. The challenges I can
