User:ClemRutter/proposal

Portal for Learning- A discussion paper

It is widely agreed that WP is poor in attracting younger editors- and servicing the need of users in primary and secondary education. Looked at another way WP is a very large dataset and we do not have the tools to allow many users to find the data they need. Large digital datasets are increasingly available- and we need to focus our attention from being the worlds largest depository of data to being the worlds most efficient portal to that data. We have to focus on listening to what our users want us to provide- so they can process the data to fit their needs. We talk about young people in a totally amateur way- the professionals are the teachers, the parents and the youngster. A wikipedia article is already 'plagiarised by students of all ages' for coursework, it is already the first port of call for teacher preparing a new topic and for parents trying to support their child. We have five million articles that may be useful but which are they? Where are they? How relevant are they? How well written are they- is there another article that may all be suitable? This is the language of tagging- so does our tagging system actually serve the child, the parent or the teacher. Should we look to a wikiproject, or should we look to wikidata?

London Grid for Learning

A lot of work has been done by London Grid for Learning, led by a group of Former ILEA advisors and Directors of Education, they have put together a partnership of schools that buy into their service. They have a list of resources that are suitable across the Key Stages for each subject area and we are mentioned.

They have assessed multiple print and digital resources for availability and suitability, and produced their own commercial material- a lot is published so we could use that to inform us while building our own initial to do list, or we could approach them to see if they are willing to form a loose partnership agreement. See:Resource grid

An example could be their London Grid for Learning BalletBoyz KS3 project. BalletBoyz is known to us- but are we known to them? Are any of the Teachers, parents and kids involved in the Harris Academies KS3 project going to use our stub- or be persuaded to improve it? London Grid for Learning BalletBoyz is also used in KS2 KS4.

A co-operative project proposal

It is proposed that each of the 5 million articles should be tagged when they have any value in a school curriculum course. Using the existing wikipedia category structure. partners and stakeholder would be able locate, then evalute relevant materials. With wikidata and simple shell scripts, the material would be available for automatic processing. If we take the UK as an example- then work outwards to include the rest of the world certain topics will occur in many adopted curricula, so the tagging system must be flexible and extendable. I propose a container template -{{Gridforlearning}} that contains a list of {{Course-suitability}}. This becomes easier if we set up a Project.

Course-suitability

It is proposed that any user may add a {{Course-suitability}} tag. The information fields to be included are a discussion stage.

{{Course-suitability|body=  |age= |curr-title= |audience= |importance= |class= |relevance= |edit-date= |assessor= |comment= |sighted= }} 

The named fields would all be free text, but we could test on the following to establish an extensive category tree.

Body	UK NC / UK Edexel/UK WJEB/ UK AEB .
Age range	KS1/ KS2/ KS3/ KS4/ KS5/ A/ EU-BAC/ UG/ PG/
Title
Audience	Teacher/ LSA/ Parent/ Student
Importance	as in any Project Assessment
class	Quality as in any Project Assessment
Relevance	to the course- Vital/Core topic/Low/background reading
edit-date	Date of assessment
Assessor	Standard 4 tildes
Comment	Free text

This will render as:

Body	Age range	Title	Audience	Importance	Quality	Relevance	year	Assessor
UK National curriculum	Key Stage 3	Dance	Student	Low	Stub	Low	2016	User:JohnDoe
Limited application						See:The Royal Ballet		√ sighted:JDW

There are obviously other possibilities here such as a See Also:, which could give transwiki links, such as :simple:article . I would also like to put in a readability index, and an indication whether the lead alone might be suitable.

I envisage that once we have established the correct partnerships, they will encourage staff teaching the course to add the {{Course-suitability}} tags to articles they used in the field.

Wikidata Proposal

As yet none has been formulated. A statement on each topic, Learning Potential= may be a way to express the classifications above.

Partners

It is often said that we don't work with schools because they are too difficult to access, and it is true that schools are too busy fulfilling their statutory duties, and they are not going to welcome a volunteer with yet another time consuming proposal. The approach that we need to take is to talk to the teacher professional organisations: NAHT, ACL, NAS/UWT or existing organisation that already serve the teaching community. London Grid for Learning seems to have the correct track record. Exam boards for KS4 and A1/A2.

What is out proposal? Our proposal is to listen to what the professionals say, and to facilitate their suggestions. This is facilitates the request for easier access.

Comments to talk page please

Comments to talk page please. User talk:ClemRutter/proposal

Wikimedia UK Education Summit 20 February 2017

• The talk notes
• The talk slides