Wikimania 2021: where to talk about Wikimedia education work: transcript

Key points

• The education team has four members based in Peru, the United States, Indonesia and India.
• Meta-Wiki's education space has a community support page that lists all participation and communication spaces in one place.
• Communication channels include the education mailing list, a Facebook group, the team's social media accounts and a newsletter with more than 200 subscribers.
• A monthly education affiliates meeting lets staff and volunteers share work such as programs from Wikimedia Argentina, Czech Republic and Indonesia.
• The EdWiki Outreach Collaborators pilot runs regional education meetings, and applications for a new round, adding a Middle East and North Africa specialist, open in September.
• The team offers one-on-one consultations and is developing EduWiki Global Live to connect with global education stakeholders such as UNESCO.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction and the education team
2. 3:12Confusion over where to talk about education work
3. 5:46Finding spaces on the Meta-Wiki education page
4. 12:45Participation spaces and affiliates meetings
5. 15:45EdWiki Outreach Collaborators and regional meetings
6. 18:41EduWiki events and one-on-one consultations
7. 20:30EduWiki Global Live and closing

Full transcript

0:00Hi, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. You know, based on where you are right now and when you're watching this video. So let me start with an introduction to myself. Hello again. My name is Ailesh Patnaik. I work as a program officer with education team at the Big Media Foundation. I have also been volunteering for this movement for over nine years now. So I may have had like multiple opportunities.

0:30to interact with you all, collaborate with you all in some projects. Maybe we also have had a chat in one of the in-person events, maybe in one of the Wikimanias or other in-person events. I'm very excited for the virtual Wikimania happening this year and for all of us having an opportunity to share and learn uh from each other the top and and i'm just i'll say i'll just i'm just excited and today the topic that i'm going to cover in this station is somehow related to that on how we can share learn collaborate and communicate about our work in education.

1:24Let's, let's get started with that and see how it goes. Before I show you the spaces of participation or the spaces of communication, I want to introduce you all to my team. We are a team of four members based in different parts of the world from Peru, the United States, Indonesia, and India. We work with people in the Wikimedia movement, educational institutions, policy makers and others to help people around the world engage with Wikimedia Group projects, to learn from them and to collaborate with them at different parts of our work.

2:11similarly there are other volunteer groups and event the affiliates have dedicated staff members or dedicated volunteers who work for who work in using wikimedia projects uh in using wikimedia projects for education uh i'll just i'll just also introduce the wikipedia An education user group. So it's a volunteer-based community and is managed by a group of volunteers from the movement. Some of the veteran education community members, I can say. And the Wikimedia and Education User Group is a global group that facilitates, supports, and advocates for implementing Wikipedia and its sister projects into educational and academic curricula in both Wikimedia movement and outside of it.

3:12So I introduced you all about some of the stakeholders in the Wikimedia education spaces. We have the Wikimedia education team that works with the foundation. We have the volunteer groups and we also have some dedicated staff members in different affiliates. So dedicated staff members and volunteers in different affiliates. and also some of the individual contributors but that's not my topic is about right my topic is about where to talk about education and the participation spaces i know like like me many of you are confused there are so many spaces in our movement where shall i communicate about my work? Is it better? Is it outreach? Is it?

4:05Or is it some other space that I have to use to, you know, showcase my work, to highlight my work or to reach for help? So, like, where shall I look for help? If it is a new project that I'm thinking to start and I need someone to guide me through it or help me through it, what is the best channel to, like, reach out to someone or reach out to the education team event? um is there a space where i can find all of the information let me let me try to answer some of this question which is which is very confusing i know for a few of us and for some people who are already in the spaces they are aware of they're in already in our movement they are aware of these spaces but again you know over the years we have also introduced some of the new spaces and the new participation opportunities for the community members so be patient and stay with me

5:07for the next 15 minutes where i'll be talking about this spaces and it's bits and bits and show you all a common space like where you can find all the information of the participation spaces that we have in our movement and these spaces have been you know there for over A few years now, and we participate in them in a continuous manner, and we learn a lot of things by participating in these spaces.

5:46So, to have all the information about the participation spaces, the best space to go currently is Metta. and i'll give it to uh to you all to this space if you if you have been in wikimedia movement for a while you might know about meta wiki uh it's a documentation wiki where where community members use it to document their work and share it share things with others and you know put reports and other documentations to the space um let me quickly show you on how to find information about these spaces on meta wiki uh just stay with me i'll share my screen again and go to meta wiki

6:46Cool. And I hope my screen is... I'm loading right now. And let me quickly show you all MetaWiki. So to reach MetaWiki, you have to type in the URL meta.wikimedia.org. And then you will come to this page, which is the main page on MetaWiki.

7:23go to the search box and type education click on education and that will bring you to the education documentation space on meta and over here you can see different uh navigation tabs where you can go if you click on home you will come to the space which explains why Wikimedians use why Wikimedians use Wikimedia projects in education and what they gain out of it and other resources you can find some of the community members you can find you can get yourself updated with news and events happening in the Wikimedia education spaces and then there is the community support when you click on the community support

8:24You will come across this page, which is a one-pager for all the participation and communication spaces we have in the education movement. If you want to share your stories and opportunities and requests for help, you can subscribe yourself to the education mailing list. You can send emails to the education mailing list. you can get yourself updated with the uh information that is coming that that comes to the education uh mailing list uh if you want if you need some help from us from the education team at the media foundation you can write to us at education uh write to us at education act wikimedia.org uh if you want to engage with education community on facebook you can join there's a Facebook group called Wikipedia and Education Group.

9:18Or if you just want to get updated about stories from the movement, you can look for them on the Facebook page of Education Team, which is Wikimedia Education Team, or on Twitter at Wikimedia Edu. And similarly, you can contribute, you can contribute, you can write your stories on the education newsletter, which is subscribed by more than 200 Wikimedians. And so they will all be aware of what the work that you are doing. As I said before, you can click on news and events and go to those spaces.

9:56Similarly, these are the communication spaces that I was talking about, and we also have some participation spaces. These years, because of the COVID-19, we have virtual participation spaces, we have the education affiliates meeting, the EDU Weeki Global Live, some EDU Weeki events and regional education meetings and you can also engage with us in the community support where we have the wikipedia and education user group and the edwiki outreach collaborators as i mentioned before wikipedia and education user group is a volunteer group and it's created by the volunteers it has board members who are volunteers and are veteran edwiki contributors in our movement you can learn more about their work by going to their page on meta so this this is enough draft of the space because i wanted to and i wanted you all to know where we have uh whether

11:01we have a common like a single page or single uh information page to find all these spaces in our movement so next time when you're planning to join any of these events you can have idea What these events do and what you can get out of these, sorry, what these spaces do and what you can get out of these spaces just by going through this page. And we are revamping, we are revamping the community participation spaces from the education team, which I'll be talking in this video later. And you'll more updates about those spaces maybe within two weeks so stay tuned and maybe bookmark this page and you'll have more updates and i'll also be writing an email to the education mailing list soon so you can have more updates there as well so that was that was my way to navigate you all to

12:04uh the a common page where you can find all the resources regarding community support so that's this page on meta wiki now let me let me let me take you back to the uh to my slide So, let's get back here. Here are the slides again. I have to close the screen and take you all to the presentation again. Okay, let's take some time.

12:45So, let me get your paper. So we talked about like a space where we can find all the information about our page where we can find all the information about participation spaces and now let's talk a bit more about those participation spaces uh i mentioned like if you want to communicate you can also go to that phase with the community support phase and find the places where you can communicate with others but if you want to participate with others if you want to talk to someone who is working uh in a different affiliate and you are inspired by their work you want to learn how they are doing in that world, where should you go?

13:47Let's see some of these spaces. Let's talk about some of these spaces and see how we can collaborate with others. So the first thing that comes to my mind for professionals in our movement, like if you're a staff in an affiliate, whether you're a full-time or part-time staff in an affiliate working on education, education, or you are a volunteer assigned by your user group to dedicatedly work for education.

14:25So we as the education team organize a monthly space for those staff and volunteers. It's a space for professional networking as well as a space for working with all these dedicated staffs. So the education affiliates meetings spaces to discuss the ongoing work of affiliates where where where they have uh education in their affiliate strategy or education in their work and they we we talk about you know like Different goals they have and how they are trying to achieve it, how we can support them and that. And I have been part of these meetings for a while now. And I've learned quite a lot by being a part of these meetings. I mean, I hear quite some interesting work from our affiliates, from Wiki Bridges that Wikimedia Argentina runs, from senior citizens,

15:45program that wikimedia czech republic runs and the teachers training program that wikimedia indonesia runs so these are some of the exciting spaces to learn what our affiliates are doing and you can look for collaboration i have seen in the past a lot of collaboration opportunities have come up uh during these affiliates meetings so i'll i'll definitely uh you know ask you to be a part of it now let's talk about another initiative which is the awk outreach collaborators so it was a pilot program that was started uh last year uh in an effort to collaborate with emerging leaders from the education community so it's a project uh it's a program that was designed for volunteers to work with volunteers and to This is a shared learning group with diverse number of participants coming from different regions of the world. And we are trying to find solutions on how to make our, how to share our work, how to hear and listen to the stories from different regions of our movement.

17:13as well as to collaborate and find inclusive practices in the education spaces so these group of volunteers help us to publish the education newsletter help us to document work on outreach weekly like for all the movement spaces documentations and also to share the stories from their region and organize office hours so i'll be talking a lot i'll be a bit about the education, regional education meetings. So these are regional education meetings are the meetings organized by one group of the AWP outreach collaborators, which are the community specialists. So these community specialists are based in different regions of our movement.

18:03From Latin America to Southeast Asia, or ECF, or South Asia, CEE, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North America, North Africa, sorry, we are introducing Middle East and North Africa regional community specialists in the next iteration of EDWK Outreach Collaborators. We'll be starting the application for you all to join us as a New York from the second week of September, and we're excited that we will hope that we will receive some good number of applicants for that.

18:41We have organized around three regional education meetings in three of the regions, CEE, South Asia and Latin America where we had the opportunity to speak to more than 15 affiliates from 20 countries with 60 participants. So these are very engaging spaces. And then also last year, because of the pandemic, we explored another opportunities for participation, which is the EduWiki events. EduWiki Week is a concept to explore opportunities with community members involved in the movement to highlight their work, share their work, and...

19:25Braille awareness on use of Wikimedia projects in education. I have quite some stories to share about the Wikidata Education Week we organized because we learned so many things on how Wikidata is being used in education, from students learning data comparison to students building new apps to those data and different things. uh similarly the education team also organizes uh also offers some uh consultations some one-on-one consultations uh the purpose of this consultation is to help community members get answers to the specific questions they have uh for their program as i mentioned before if you have a new program to talk about like if you're planning to start a new program where are you going to talk about it so you can reach out to the education team and seek for help and request a request for help so you can scan this QR code to be there you can use the bitlist short link

20:30and we are also exploring another opportunity which is the eduity global live it's a it's a new format that we are bringing to connect the education community with the global stakeholders of education and, for example, UNESCO or other global education champions, I use the word. And this is going to be an online meeting to have real-time conversations for them to connect the work of Wikimedia with their goals. And, you know, we can also use it as an opportunity to collaborate with each other.

21:12uh i think that was the last thing i hope i was able to share the things that i wanted to share if you have any questions uh you can reach out to me or you can re i i'm i'm in charge of the community organizing work for the uh education team so feel free to reach out to me and my email address or you can talk to the team or you can reach out to me in my media in my wikimedia account so that's all thank you everyone thanks for being being here and for listening to me bye

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2021 – Where to talk about Education Education community participation spaces and more!.webm by Wikimania 2021 (2021-08-14), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.