Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Education Collab meeting Yerevan 2017

Title ideas

• The Wikipedia & Education User Group was created when Education Collaborative meets in Armenia
• A new stage of evolution: Wikipedia & Education User Group
• Growing education in the Wikimedia Movement: introducing proposed Wikipedia & Education User Group

Summary

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• Wikimedia Education Collab members met in Yerevan to reflect on the improvements they had implemented over the last year and to form a new User Group for better advocacy and communication.

Body

Tables and chairs place in a gymnasium for final tests. Liang-chih ShangKuan(WMTW), CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Education Collab members met local Wikipedia educators in Ayb School, Armenia. See the 360 version by Liang-chih ShangKUan, CC-BY-SA 4.0.

From June 2 to 4, 2017, the annual meeting of the "Wikipedia Education Collaborative" (a.k.a "The Collab") took place in Yerevan, Armenia. Program Leaders from 10 different countries were invited to discuss the trends, the needs, the challenges and solutions, and develop a consolidated strategy towards the future of the global educational initiatives in Wikipedia and its sister projects.

There was something symbolic in the fact that this very important meeting took place in Armenia, which is one of the leading countries of innovation in the field of Wiki in Education practices. The Armenian wiki in education program has support of the highest possible levels in the country, and sets an example for educational collaborations to the rest of the Wikimedia movement.

The decision taken at the meeting was to transform the informal working group known as "The Collab" to a "user group" format, a recognizable entity by the WMF with formal procedures. This step is the natural evolution for the group, which has focused for the past 4 years on the global needs and promotion of wiki in education initiatives. This is also the answer to the pressing need of this community to have its platform for sharing its resources and experiences, and voice its needs of technological and infrastructural solutions, facilitating the joint work of teachers, students and wiki communities.

The idea of the newly proposed "Wikipedia & Education User Group" is to preserve the current horizontal structure of cooperation and decision making, while achieving better communication and more opportunities for publicity, visibility and access to resources, both within the Wikimedia movement, and in the global ecosystem of knowledge. Through engaging formal and informal education, we believe that every member of society will be able to know how to contribute to and learn from open knowledge through Wikimedia projects.

Vassia Atanassova, Wikimedians of Bulgaria, ..., ..., ...