Grants:PEG/WM HK/Education Toolkits For Liberal Studies/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2010-11 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/WM HK/Education Toolkits For Liberal Studies.

You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Introduction

In Hong Kong, Wikipedia is a very common website, specifically for students. They would like to surfing Wikipedia because searching information, finishing homework, etc. As the highly common platform for them to use, they are now mainly using Wikipedia in a “Copy-and-Paste” fashion, without any critical thinking, or even never confirming the credibility of the information.

Aims

In the project of “Education toolkits on Liberal Studies” (“LS toolkits”), it aims to promote a better, more constructive way to use Wikipedia, rather than just Copy-and-Paste.

Moreover, Wikipedia as a dynamic information source, it is helpful for the local students to face the new liberal studies subject, which require their knowledge on the current affairs.

Also, we have to promote our own local chapter, Wikimedia Hong Kong, to the local students to recruit more long-term volunteers, no matter online editing, or executive assistance.

Expenditure

Documentation of expenditures has been received by WMF.

Remaining funds are due to WMF. The grantee should return these funds to WMF by bank transfer. Contact grantsadmin at wikimedia dot org to let WMF know to expect the funds. Instructions for returning funds to WMF are at Grants:Return unused funds to WMF.

In this project, only expenditure are the printing and postage cost. We had spent HKD18,000 (USD2,320) for printing all 94,200 sets of LS toolkits, and then HKD13,188 (USD1,699) spend on local postage the LS toolkits to all 471 secondary schools in Hong Kong.

Feedback from students

In this project, we had conduct a number of workshops to the students in specific schools. Moreover, we have conducted surveys after the workshops, in order to understand how effective the toolkit is.

The questionnaire included the following question, they can sorce the question in between 1 to 4 (1 = strongly disagree; 2 = disagree; 3 = agree; 4 = strongly agree):

Question	Average sorce
Can this toolkits help you to...
understand more about Wikipedia?	3.087
get more information on Wikipedia?	3.130
build an interest about Wikipedia?	2.870
ensure your learning of LS subject?	2.609
Can you fully understand how to … on Wikipedia?
switch another language	3.043
get information in the past history	2.739
seek for other related information	3.043

Also, we had added a quiz with two short multiple choices question as the final part of the questionnaire, which can be an indicator whether the students really understand the infomation contains in toolkits.

We can conclude, from the responses in the survey, that many students agreed that the toolkits can help them in general, for some basic usage for Wikipedia.

Also, we notice that some students cannot really understand the information from the toolkits. On the other hand, some students show their through understanding on the toolkit, and even found it interesting. If this project keeps running in the future, we need some fine tune to cope with the difference intelligence of students. It may need to design toolkits in several difference version for such purpose.

Further corporation opportunities

In this project, we had a great opportunity to co-operate with a number of local secondary schools, especially a few of them allow us to have a workshop with their students. There are still a number schools keeping in touch with us, in order to have some similar workshops in their school. This is very helpful to increase our influence in the education sector.

Afterwords

For the students' LS group project, it is requested the students to submit with a list of references. After we had promoting our LS toolkits, teachers told us that the students are more willing to list their reference out of Wikipedia.

Moreover, as the feedback of educators, there are used to have similar group project, for the students whom are studying for their last year of primary school life. We can design to have our education toolkits with use of Wikipedia for primary students.

Also, on the mass posting issue, we could find out some special post office which can provide mass posting service. That can reduce the time spent on sending the toolkits to the schools, rather than send the toolkits out one-by-one.