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Wiki, what’s going on? (Part19-XMas is coming!)

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Christmas with the WikiToLearn community

 

Let’s start with important things. Last Sunday the Milan local group had a special dinner to celebrate the incoming Christmas holidays. For sure we have to thank Spinnski: food was great! During the dinner we had Secret Santa: you receive a gift, given by whom? According to fate. It was funny, and we had lot of laughs for some funny gifts.

Ok, let’s get back to business. We are working to get more collaborations concrete, especially from the institutional point of view. WikiMediaCH, Rete della Conoscenza (Italy) and Imperial College London are among the most important “institutions” we are going to collaborate with. The test group is working harder and harder to get a (adjustment) stable release by Christmas, let’s say our Christmas gift for you! Nothing will apparently change for you, but the real show is in the infrastructure.

Stay tuned, we have great plans for the new year. The first thing you have to wait for is WikiToLearnConf India2017, happening in Jaipur 18-19 January. The first WikiToLearn global event is coming: call for papers are open, join and share Knowledge!

Probably you will read the next “Wiki, what’s going on?” episode in the new year. Hopefully great work is incoming and we hope to impress you more and more! Let me take this occasion to wish you happy holidays, from the whole WikiToLearn community 😀

 

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? (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!

Wiki, what’s going on? (Part 14-Akademy Day3-4)

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WTLGoinOn

On the buzzer! We are moving toward the 1.0 release faster and faster and by the end of this month it should be ready. Today is the last day here at Akademy and we managed to move all the courses under the convention defined. We have introduced the new namespace “Course” for each course both on the italian and english portal. This new structure is mandatory for the complete implementation of course editor. Scripts over scripts, lines of code over lines of code, discussions over discussion: these two days were tough. The migration is now completed and our work at Akademy has been great. We are documenting everything on phabricator to have a complete organization of what we have to do yet.

 

Akademy was great! We worked hard and closed many tasks. The new release still requires time and efforts, but we are moving toward the right direction. By the end of the week we are going to be back in Italy, but we are leaving Berlin with a precise intention: release the best 1.0 we can have!

We have to work on different aspects, from community building and participation to development and infrastructure. We are tying to keep everything under control to come up with the best possible version of the release. This year was fundamental to us: we understood what we could improve and we tried our best to do it. The deadline is near, but no fear! WikiToLearn is rising from its own ashes like a phoenix: be ready for the revolution!

A special mention goes to the organization of this conference – KDE community and everyone involved were simply awesome.

It was also awesome to get in touch with JGupta and to meet him in person. We hope to have the possibility to meet every WikiToLearn-er soon!

That’s all,

Akademy is almost over, but our work is not.

Stay tuned, the revolution is coming!

 

thanks4akademy