Education/News/February 2022/Results of "Reading Wikipedia" workshop in the summer school of Plan Ceibal in Uruguay
Results of "Reading Wikipedia" workshop in the summer school of Plan Ceibal (Uruguay)
This month, Wikimedistas de Uruguay conducted a workshop on "Reading Wikipedia" for the Summer School of Plan Ceibal (a national program that delivers computers to students and teachers). We had around 20 teachers and school librarians actively participating in the workshop.
We replicated a similar experience that we did last year, also invited by Plan Ceibal. For this particular workshop, we changed a bit the order of operations, allowing for more interactions with the public in between. You can find all the materials (in Spanish) that we used for this workshop.
We want to thank Melissa Huertas for all her support in putting together this workshop.
A highlight
This activity was financially supported by Plan Ceibal. We had to submit a form to participate in the summer school describing the goal of the activity and a small run of the show, and we got paid a stipend that will go back to the chapter as an in-kind donation.
Run of the show
- We asked them about their own assumptions about what "digital literacy" means.
- We explained the concepts of digital literacy and how they were connected to Wikipedia.
- Then, we surfaced their own assumptions about Wikipedia through Mentimeter. The main goal of these questions was to surface their real knowledge of the platform and understand their reactions when they see something inaccurate on Wikipedia.
- After that, we introduced several important concepts as to how Wikipedia is made.
- We then went to an exercise where they were instructed to read a Wikipedia article themselves about local knowledge and culture and evaluate its quality. We provided some guiding questions: "How many references does it have? What's the quality of the sources? Do you see any missing sections? How long is the lead section? What points do you think could be expanded?"
- Their answers were captured in Google Doc, with options to highlight the good & bad aspects.
- After that, we presented the program "Reading Wikipedia in the classroom" so they could replicate this experience themselves.
- For closing, we did a small survey to collect their emails and understand their change in perceptions after the workshop. The vast majority (12 people) responded that they felt that "They now understood better how Wikipedia works and how to use it".
During the workshop
- There were too many people to let them introduce themselves. Instead, we asked them to introduce themselves in the Zoom chat and we read their participation as they were introducing themselves.
- For conducting the debate, we mainly use Mentimeter and Google Docs, but we also offer them the option to participate through the Zoom chat. This is particularly useful for people that are experiencing connectivity issues.
- We also offered them the option to raise hands and participate at any time. Someone had already participated in an edit-a-thon targeted towards the afrouruguayan community and it was very interesting to learn about their experience and have the rest of the participants hear about it. It also provided us the opportunity to reconnect with them.
Lessons learned
As with the previous workshop, there are some things we'd do differently this time:
- At the top of the Google Doc, we should add a note saying You allow for these observations to be released under a CC BY SA 4.0 license. Why? Because some of the feedback they were giving was really good, and it could be incorporated during the workshop to the Talk page on Wikipedia articles so they can see live how their opinions are already helping to assess the quality of Wikipedia articles.
- We should have added a question on the survey to ask them what things we could improve or do differently, to learn more about their experience.
What's next?
We plan to send some of these teachers a follow-up email in the upcoming months to test whether they're applying what they've learned and learn from them.