Day 1
This Facilitators Guide to Learning4Content Workshops is a work in progress.
Contents
Day One workshop objectives and schedule
This is only a suggested schedule. You will have to customise it to suit the needs of your particular group of trainees. Also, you maybe have your own preferred style and techniques. Please remember, you are welcome to add to this Facilitator's Guide and improve it!
The general objectives for the first day of the workshop are given below. Learning on Day 1 will start quite slowly, and care is needed to avoid confusion later on. But expect the group to pick up and accelerate their learning rapidly on day 2 and 3.
Objectives
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You can be happy if at the end of day 1:
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Remember to
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Schedule
Suggested timings only.
| Time | Activity |
| 08:30 | Arrival and registration |
| 09:00 | Official Opening |
| 09:15 | Introduction |
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| 10:30 | Tea / coffee break |
| 10:45 | Lesson 1 - What is a Wiki? |
| 11:30 | Lesson 2 - Creating an account |
| 12:30 | Lunch Break |
| 13:30 |
Continue Lesson 2 Lesson 3 - Editing basics |
| 14:30 | Lesson 4 - Basic text Formatting |
| 15:30 | Tea / Coffee |
| 15:45 |
Continue lesson 4 Activity - Wikieducator, OERs and Quality |
Opening
You will have been informed by the COL Focal Point if an official will be opening the workshop. Make sure you have their full name and title.
Introductions
You can respond to the official opening by giving the participants some information about yourself.
In my region it is expected of one to explain who you are and why you have come to run the workshop. I usually explain my connections with the region, my experience in the education sector and how the workshop is relevant to me, and a bit about my family! - David Leeming, L4C facilitator, Pacific Islands region
You can now go round the table quickly and loosen people up with their own introductions.
Background and Context
It is good to set the context with a few slides.
For instance:
- education reform in the region
- problems and pressing issues for the education systems, especially concerning content
- any local resonances / relevancy
Introducing the workshop
You can follow this process to introduce the workshop:
- Make sure that everyone has a printed copy of the agenda, with your final schedule. Go over the agenda.
- Write the objectives for Day 1 on the white-board or use a slide)
- If you have copies of the Wikieducator brochure, hand hese out and this makes a good way to introduce the Wikieducator, and who it is aimed at helping
You should now provide a summary of each of the following.
Learning Contracts
Remind them that they should have completed these, if not hand out copies at the workshop. Summarise briefly what they are - i.e. not legal documents, of course, but simple statements of intent to commit to "paying" for their training by contributing a little knowledge back to the community in the form of an open education resource.
At the same time, check they have all completed the registration form and explain that it will help them when they make their user page (good time to bring up yours and show them).
Wiki certification scheme
Another good opportunity to shw your user page, with Wiki certification, and explain that they will also achieve this accreditation.
Training certificates
Finally, mention that COL will provide training certificates and mail to the COL focal point, to be signed for each participant.
Introduction to Learning4Content
As mentioned earlier in this guide (Preparations), there is a 20-minute animated presentation by Wayne Mackintosh to introduce the Learning4Content program and wider context of the Wikieducator workshops. This is available here, streamed, or in advance from Wayne (HTML package, about 21MB). It plays fine if you have a fast connection, but otherwise you have to wait for each page to load.
The above is a very good start as it puts the workshop in it's widest context and explains the vision very nicely and professionally.
After the slide show, you can also briefly introduce the history of Open Educational Resources, for instance by explaining how the term was coined at a UNESCO meeting, the Cape Town Declaration, etc., and add to this with your comments.
It is a good idea to also briefly mention Open Content Publishing Licensing Schemes at this point. Explain that this is just a brief intro, and that it will be discussed further on day 3.
A good method is to draw a copyright symbol, ask what it means, then reverse the "C" and they will (with good humour) deduce the phrase "Copy-left".
The Lessons
You have at your disposal the lesson handouts and slide shows (in ODT format - for Open Office), and also the online tutorials when preparing for the workshop. It is not always necessary to go through the entire slide shows, as in many ways they are rather over-detailed.
You may choose to rework some of these slide shows to suit your own presentation style.
However, they are useful in outlining the objectives and providing some syntax examples.
Another approach is to draw out, or illustrate, key lessons first, then use slide show to reinforce and summarise. Make use of the whiteboard to illustrate.
- You can use your rich text editor (Writer, Word, etc) to produce examples of syntax in large fonts on the fly
- You can also use (in your Sandbox) the pedagogical templates to give objectives and activities.....this introduces the templates in advance and foreshadows Lesson 9.
In the following, please refer primarily to the lesson materials. The text below is a commentary.
Lesson Guides
I have found that participants really do find the user guides / lesson guides useful. So again, please do encourage the organizers to make available a copy for each participant, bound nicely for future reference. Make them available in electronic format, for participants to copy on their own flash drives.
Lesson 1a What is a Wiki?
You can use the following scheme:
- Bring up the Wikipedia and ask the group if they know what it is
- Demonstrate searching for something
- Illustrate how popular it is by doing a Google search where the top result is very likely to be Wikipedia
- Spend 10 minutes with participants doing their own searches
- Point out some features of wiki pages as you go along
You can now ask them "What is a Wiki" and then bring up the slides for Lesson 1a.
For the activity, consider displaying the task as below.
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Complete the activity by asking for feedback. You can have some fun, especially with "Wikihow" if you choose some funny examples of "How to....."
Open Educational Resources
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Look at some OER websites
Some others below
http://wikiedcator.org Wikieducator http://www.oercommons.org OER Commons http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn Open University – OpenLearn Not really OERs but links to freely accessible content http://www.schoolnet.net.sb Solomon Islands SchoolNet
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Lesson 2: Creating account
Participants will enjoy finally getting into the practical side of the training. You can start by showing them your user page and the Wiki certification, and explaining that they will all be creating their own user pages and will get wikibuddy certification.
You can use the slide-show to summarise the objectives.
I have tried various techniques but the simplest and most effective is to demonstrate creating an account to the full group, using the projector, then use the slideshow to take them through the process step by step.
Note: a careful step-by-step approach, leading the group together at the same time, is essential in this lesson If this is neglected, confusion over user names can waste a lot of time later on.
In this lesson, the critical issues that the participants must understand, are:
Choosing user names
- A unique user name is needed (explain why)
- The user name is case sensitive
- Good practice with choosing a user name is:
- Start with a capital letter to avoid ambiguity
- Avoid dots, spaces, underscores in user names
- A good unique and unambiguous user name would be the participant's full name as a single word, or a nickname or local language name
- First letter of participant's first name as a Capital
- Surname in lowercase - one word.
- For example Wayne Mackintosh would be: Wmackintosh
This can save time for Newbies who may forget their username
Other issues when creating the account
- Emphasise that the email addresses must be typed in 100% correctly
- It doesn't harm to ask them all to wait until you check, before clicking create account
Completing the class list
- Request participants to complete the Class List (pdf), including their usernames. You will need this to update the links to user pages on the dedicated workshop page for this workshop.
Do this well. If rushed, it will waste lots of time later when they can't log on or are otherwise confused.
My approach is to have them all sitting with the "Login successful" page ready for lesson 3, and then....
Lessons 3 - 5: Editing, basic text formatting, introducing new pages and links
These lessons are straightforward and you can choose to use the slide shows, although it probably isn't necessary.
I have found that it's best to bring forward part of lesson 5 and introduce the idea of new pages and links. However, this depends on the prior experience of the group. If they do not appreciate the idea of websites with pages and links, it may be best to take them through the basic editing first.
Starting with all participants having successfully created accounts, a good sequence to follow is:
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Locating your User Page
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Creating a user page and sandbox
- Introduce new page links
- Create user pages by adding [[/My_Sandbox]]
Ask why the forward slash was used to create a sand box. This will be an opportunity to explain the flat and hierarchical structures and why it would be a problem if they all added My_Sandbox without the forward slash (they would be trying to all create the same page).
Note: It is essential to emphasise throughout the workshop, that unique names are needed for pages in the flat structure.
Good habits: Learning to use the summary and minor edit checkbox
When they save their user pages for the first time, you will show the participants the controls and options below the edit window, and highlight the following:
- They should get into the habit of checking the minor edit check-box and adding a short summary. Explain why: at a later stage they may need to revert back or identify the page history. You can make a joke of it, asking a $100 fine for anyone who forgets.
- Write in big letters on the board: Save your work frequently or be prepared to lose it!! and explain the preview and save options carefully.
Working in the Sandbox
After saving their edits, they will have created their user page and created a link to their Sandbox.
- They should now be asked to click on the link to their sandbox, and edit the page to create it.
You can now move on to explaining the basic text formating, following the lesson guides.
Use of the rich text editor / Editor Toolbar
I do not encourage the use of the rich text editor until later. The participants need to understand the basics of wiki markup before they take short cuts. I have found that if participants start using the toolbar too early on, it disrupts the workshop as you have to help them make corrections when they add markup that they do not understand.
Quality debate
Although this activity is part of Lesson 1, I have found it is best to start with the practical side of the training and make progress whilst people are quite fresh, and then return to it at the end of the day. The procedure would be:
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What about Quality?
It is also useful to ask them if open authoring is appropriate in their professional work, and what issues there might be for their organisations in moving towards open authoring and open educational resources. Call the groups back to give oral feedback. This is likely to be a very interesting discussion.
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Ask them to keep their notes for the next day, when they will be entering their group feedback into a specially created page linked to the workshop page.
This worked well at L4C11 in PNG. They discussed in groups and came up with some very interesting feedback orally. We finished the day on that note, and before the next morning I created a link to a feedback page, with a sub-page for each group. They were asked to nominate one person to maintain the page, whilst the others discussed it using the discussion page. This had provided some nice feedback, and also introduced collaboration. They will discover things like conflicts in editing pages, and quickly realise the issues when collaborating.
Concluding session
- Introduce participants to WikiMaster -- WikiEducator's community certification programme;
- Advice participants that you will be reviewing userpages to apply the certification
- Participants are motivated by this immediate recognition of progress.
Final tasks for Day 1
- Make sure that you have updated the participant list table on the homepage for this L4C workshop. The workshop homepage should be linked as a subpage from the register of L4C Face-to-Face Workshops;
- Upload a selection of photo's from the first day on the workshop homepage;
- Create links to individual user pages from the workshop homepage using the class list you distributed to collect usernames.
- Go to each user page, and if participants have demonstrated the skills required for WikiApprentice Level 1 certify accordingly using the instructions below.
Instructions for certifying participants
- Go to each user page and personal sandbox an check that the user has demonstrated the skills for:
- Bold
- Italics
- Headings and subheadings
- Bullet lists
- Numbered lists
- On each user page, copy and paste the following syntax:
{{Infobox_personal
|Name =
|Photo=
|Website=
|Occupation =
|Nationality =
|Country=
|Employer =
|Other roles =
|Email=
|Boxes =
|WM1=
}}
- Type in the name, another field (for instance Country) and apply the certification according the instructions provided for the Infobox_personal template
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