Preparation for the face-to-face session
This preparation will take around one hour. We will assume that you have completed this as the course facilitator will be addressing activities 1–5 at the beginning of the face-to-face session. Make notes relating to the reflection points in the activities and bring these with you to the session.
Activity 1 Familiarising yourself with Wikipedia and its sister sites
The objective of this course activity is to become more familiar with Wikipedia and its range of sister sites.
Before the facilitated session, please visit Wikipedia [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] . You will see on the homepage just how multilingual Wikipedia has become. Click on the English version to access the encyclopaedia.
Before moving on, take a look at the English-language homepage. You will see a featured article that changes daily. Other features of this page include news items and a ‘what happened on this day’ list of historical events. There is also a picture of the day and a ‘did you know’ section. Being familiar with this opening page will help when conveying to your learners how they can make full use of Wikipedia as a resource, as well as uploading content to it later.
Wikipedia has a number of sister sites. Reflect for a moment on how you might be able to make use of these associated resources in your teaching. For example, asking students to bring in the Wikiquote ‘Quote of the Day’ to present to the rest of the class and comment on. Or you might want to encourage your learners to write short news articles for the Wikinews site, where original stories can be uploaded.
Activity 2 Facts about Wikipedia
The objective of this course activity is to become more aware of some of the key facts about Wikipedia that can be used to demonstrate this resource to learners.
Selling Wikipedia to learners is important for them to see this as an exciting activity. Find out some key facts about Wikipedia to impress your learners. At time of writing, Wikipedia carried 3,724,503 articles but this number changes regularly. It is the largest encyclopaedia in the world and other wiki-encyclopaedias are available, but none have as many entries. To find out more about Wikipedia in order to introduce this to learners, click on the word Wikipedia in the page title ‘Welcome to Wikipedia’. Here you can find out more about the principles behind Wikipedia and why it has become a much-debated phenomenon.
Introduction