2019:Education/Designing an interface for teachers and librarians

Education/Designing an interface for teachers and librarians

Title

Designing an interface to meet the expectations of teachers and librarians

Session leader(s)

Full Name*	Email address*	Wikimedia Username (if you have one)	Affiliation	Country	Role, website or any other details you'd like to share
Gabriel Thullen	gabrielthullen.com	GastelEtzwane (talk)	WMCH	Switzerland	French Wiki: Projet:Cycle-O-Pedia

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Workshop to identify and try to solve problem -60 min / 90 min / 120 min / if longer, indicate specifically

Length of session

90 minutes that way people can come and go during the workshop.

Description

The school librarians in Geneva (Switzerland) have been asking for access to an online encyclopedia for years and years. We all know that Wikipedia is widely used in educational circles, so it was a great surprise for me when I found out that the Geneva Education department bought a subscription to the school edition of Encyclopædia Universalis, a French language general encyclopedia published by Encyclopædia Britannica. The subscription was purchased for librarians and teachers, not for use directly by students.

The purchase of this particular online encyclopedia was not motivated by any study of the different available encyclopedias, so we can only speculate on the reasons for this choice. My hypothesis is that the interface of the subscription based online encyclopedia provides direct access to few functionalities and tools useful for educators, and this is missing in Wikipedia interface which has a what could be called a "one size fits all" design. This quote from « Britannica School », the corresponding English language encyclopedia, gives an idea of what those functionnalities might be:

Welcome to Britannica School, a safe, up-to-date, and age-appropriate information resource for Elementary, Middle, and High School.

Discover encyclopedia articles, multimedia, primary sources, games, and other learning resources that support student research and reinforce curriculum standards.

This workshop will enable different attendees interested in education to exchange ideas and to work on designing an interface suitable for use by school librarians and school teachers. What do the other on-line encyclopedias offer that Wikipedia does not? What would we, as educators, add to the interface? How can we make it more appealing to librarians and school teachers?

It would appear that we have it all, but in many different places...

Supporting work

• Britannica School
• Wikipedia:Schools/Teachers' Guide
• Wikipedia:FAQ/Schools
• Portal:Education
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Education

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

• Theme n° 4: Quality Education: this workshop is all about collecting ideas and designing an interface that would make Wikipedia more appealing to librarians and educators, in such a way that they may use it as a tool to better exploit the wealth of knowledge stored in Wikipedia.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

• The participants will have discussed and designed an interface to be used by librarians and educators. This interface will gather in one place the different tools and projects that already exist on Wikipedia, and will be easy to translate in different languages.

Relation to other Spaces

• Libraries

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room:

  small classroom

• Audience:

  no more than 20

• Recording:

  Workshop format with free-flowing discussions, maybe some simultaneously.