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Wiki, what’s going on? (Part21-Guess who’s back)

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“Wiki, what’s going on?” is back again and has a lot to say!

It’s exams period and many of us are studying for our exams. You should already know where to look for good material to ace your exams: WikiToLearn!

It’s been a while since the last episode came out and we have several things to talk about.

Let’s start with the most important one: WikiToLearn India Conference 2017! I am very pleased to announce that the first conference entirely dedicated to and organized by WikiToLearn has been a great success! I did not take part in the conference personally, but I’ve only got positive feedbacks about it. These days our social pages are sharing blog posts of people who attended the conference, don’t miss them to have a direct validation of these words!

I am positively impressed by the huge number of people who joined the conference and by the quality of the talks organized. From what I heard and read, I am also very pleased about the hype surrounding WikiToLearn during conference days.

It is somehow surprising to note how the project is growing and the global interest in it. The location, the number of volunteers, the great quality of given talks and the possibility of dialogue between audience and speakers are fundamental for the success of a conference. I could not be more happy seeing that #WTLIndiaConf had all these points!

Talking about numbers and statistics, it is encouraging to see the number of active users growing as well as the number of registered users on the platform. Exams period indeed: study with WikiToLearn, improve the quality of the material you are studying on and pass your exams (almost) effortless!

Our tech team is working on minor improvements to give you the best WikiToLearn day after day. We are working on an official document to help us during the test phases of new releases. Become an official WTLdeveloper and help us find and fix bugs!

Recently, we have also been to FOSDEM. No talks delivered, but excellent opportunity to spread the word about WikiToLearn in an international event. We spoke with several people involved in academia and open education. Two complete books were donated to WikiToLearn and are about to be uploaded on the site.

Our project happens to interest more and more people and this is amazing. Spread the word about WikiToLearn and become part of the family. Create books, share knowledge!

Part of the core group is planning its presence at OSCAL. With WikiToLearn1.0 perfectly running and WTL2 set up for the (upcoming) future, we have a lot to share.

Hopefully we are taking part in more and more events to make WikiToLearn known and to find new, willing, collaborators. The WikiToLearn family is waiting for you!

This episode ends here… Hope to see news from you, WikiToLearn-ers!

 

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 18-Making it real)

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WTLGoinOn

 

WikiToLearn1.0 action plan is getting real

 

Release the new version and start working to improve it : done.

Ok, done! Now let’s start talking about it, spam it, find new users and grow more and more!

Yes, more or less this is the work we are doing in these weeks with our team.

Unimib is funding posters, which we are using to start a new promotional campaign for WikToLearn! Promo team is working on these new info-graphics and you are going to love them. Unimib students, stay tuned and get ready to spot our posters all around you.

We are working hard also from both institutional and more informal contacts: new collaborators are coming. The team is organizing and taking part to new events in the incoming future; stay tuned, more people are going to talk about us and you’ll appreciate our efforts! We are also planning a series of new talks to present the new release and to get more and more people involved in our project.

We are also working on agreements with different universities and institutional centers such as GARR, Imperial College and UCL.

Christmas is coming, if you have ideas to celebrate it with our community contact us! WikiToLearn1.0 is going to celebrate its first XMas 😉

C’mon, new year with the new WikiToLearn is coming: the moment is now!

Share your knoledge, share freedom!

wtl1-0

 

Wiki(1.0), what’s going on? (Part17)

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wtl1-0

WikiToLearn1.0 is moving its first steps, let’s find out how is it going!

Here we go! It is almost two weeks now since we released WikiToLearn1.0!

Since the release, we got a lot of feedback and support! We could accomplish this not only through our own promotion, but also, inter alia/amongst others, with the help of:

  1. Dot-Kde announcement;
  2.  An interview with Radio Popolare (Italian radio station);
  3.  baltolkien ‘s post on KDE-Blogs;
  4.  a presentation at Imperial College London;
  5.  Wikimedia CH, KDE and many contributors of ours shared the announcement post on their socials

We are very happy, that we could welcome new contributors and we hope our community will keep on growing, both in contribution and content.

Now, something special for you in this episode! We have decided to do an interview with Srijan Agarwal: he is a member of our community in Amrita University, Amritapuri, India, where he’s doing great promoting WikiToLearn! To spread the word about our community, he is organizing events (MediaWikiToLearn hack/edit-a-thon) and talks on WikiToLearn. We wanted to appreciate his efforts and therefore , we decided to put him into WikiToLearn’s  spotlight and  interviewed him.

Q: When (and how) did you become a member of the WikiToLearn community?
Ans: So, it all started after I made my first technical contribution to Mediawiki in early 2016. I was looking for a project to contribute to in Google Summer of Code that same year, and one of my mentors at Free Software club in our campus : FOSS@Amrita, Harish Navnit, asked me to check WikiToLearn. And there starts my journey with WikiToLearn. I applied for a project : Offline Extension for WikiEditor, and it got accepted. My GSoC mentors, Gianluca Rigoletti and Irene Cortinovis, were really helpful and guided me throughout the summer of 2016.

Q: You are part of the community for a while now. What do you like most?
A: I really like the motive behind the WikiToLearn project.. WikiToLearn focuses on a worldwide problem with students, that can be solved by sharing knowledge. Being a student myself, I’ve experienced and know the problems faced by students and I really like how WikiToLearn is helping solve these problems.

Q: You are doing a great work to talk about WikiToLearn in your country, can you tell us something more about it?
A: Sure. What I feel is that, Indian education system lacks creativity, collaborative thinking and a technology infrastructure. WikiToLearn is a platform, which certainly is the answer to these problems. Therefore, I’m promoting WikiToLearn in India in as many ways as I can. I have been giving talks on WikiToLearn at universities and conferences, eventually helping students and professors with contributing to WikiToLearn. I’m now working on making the next event a success, i.e, WikiToLearn India Conference, 2017.

Q: Are you happy with your WikiToLearn-experience so far?
A: Yes of course. WikiToLearn is like a second family for me. It has taught me that love for knowledge and learning can overcome all kinds of barriers, even geographical and cultural ones. Working with such amazing developers around the world has taught me so very much. I have grown so much technically and socially with my association with WikiToLearn. Overall, my experience has been startling.

Q: Why should other people join WikiToLearn?
A: Are you a student and want to have personalised textbooks for your courses? Are you a professor and want to make your teaching methodologies better?  Are you a programmer, and want to contribute to open source software? WikiToLearn is the right place for you, then. Join WikiToLearn and grow along with volunteers and academics around the world.

If you are more curious on who are our top contributors these two weeks after the release, want to know more about our statistics you should know that with the 1.0 release, Reports-WikiToLearn came out too. Here you can find these two weeks report!

Thats it for this episode,

Bye all! 🙂

 

 

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part16 – Where have you been?)

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WTLGoinOn

 

Join the revolution: WikiToLearn1.0 is here!

 

It’s been a while since the last episode of “Wiki, What’s going on?” was published. In the meanwhile great things happened!

Yesterday #WikiToLearn 1.0 was finally released and we’re extremely happy of this. “What’s going on?” was not on holiday, we were working hard to provide you the new WikiToLearn!

It was a great day, we are extremely happy for the love you showed us on our facebook and twitter pages: stay tuned for more news in the following days!

I’m not here to tell you how many new cool features you can find in the new release, since probably you already know. If you don’t check out our press release and the dot-kde article! The new WikiToLearn is amazing: the best you’ve experienced up to now!

“Wiki, What’s going on” is back, but we also have more news: thanks to our reports now you can have constant (bi-weekly) updates on our work; the homepage contains new languages and we’re ready to guide you in the discovery in all the new features.

We are extremely excited for this new release: now it’s time to get even more concrete than before.

Join Wikitolearn, learn with the best. Create books. Share knowledge!

The waiting is over, 1.0 is now live: it’s time to rock WikiToLearn-ers!

wtl1-0

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 15-It’s been a while)

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WTLGoinOn

 

Even if you’ve not heard from us for a while, doesn’t mean we disappeared! Here we go again with “Wiki, what’s going on?”.

So, what happened after Akademy? Quite a lot, since everything you’ve read in our previous posts was developed in details and the 1.0 release is now getting closer and closer.

Let’s have a step back: during Akademy we started working on the new skin, which is now almost complete and available in a beta version in production! Course Editor was one of our biggest efforts during our period in Berlin and now we are happy to announce that is alive in production. With these two features WikiToLearn is going to change, and you are going to love it! With more attention to UX and a easier editing environment we hope you to use WikiToLearn more and more: share your knowledge!

The site usability is improved also thanks to the creation of new guides, localized to every language portal, to allow anyone to be able to write on WikiToLearn.

In this period we also had the MediaWikiToLearn at Amrita University, Amritapuri Campus. Here we had the first Memorandum of Understanding signing between WikiToLearn and the Amrita University. Many students had the possibility to discover WikiToLearn and the way it works, hoping that they loved it and are willing to join our project. This event gave us the possibility to collect important feedbacks, extremely useful for the 1.0 release.

 

WikiToLearn 1.0 is going to be released soon, with lot of new (and cool) features. Beside course editor and the new skin, with the new release we are going to launch our new communication plan. “Wiki, what’s going on?” was thought as a series of blog posts to allow you to be updated on what happens in our community, but with the problem that it’s not really periodic and it based on a blog structure. With the new communication plan, anyone can be always updated thanks to the new “WikiToLearn Reports”: a bi-weekly official report of what’s going on in our community, with statistics of each project.

For sure there is something I’ve not told you about in the new WikiToLearn, but you are going to discover it by yourself (or thanks to the new report system, or with “Wiki, what’s going on?”). Stay tuned: WikiToLearn 1.0 has never been this close!