2019:Education/Sharing knowledge beyond classrooms

Education/Sharing knowledge beyond classrooms

Title

Sharing knowledge beyond classrooms

Session leader(s)

Arul George Scaria

Full Name*	Email address*	Wikimedia Username (if you have one)	Affiliation	Country	Role, website or any other details you'd like to share
Arul GeorgeScaria	arul.scaria@nludelhi.ac.in	Example	National Law University, Delhi	India	Assistant Professor and Co-Director, Centre for Innovation, IP, and Competition, National Law University, Delhi https://nludelhi.ac.in/pep-fac-new-pro.aspx?Id=46

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:

Lightning talk - 3 - 5 min.
Lecture - 25 min (20 min + 5 min for questions)

Length of session

This can be either a lecture or a lightning talk

Description

This talk aims to discuss how inclusion of Wikipedia related assignments as part of a course curriculum can provide students not just exposure to the comprehensive editing process behind Wikipedia, but also give them a richer education experience. This talk will also examine how such an approach contributes to two important SDGs - quality education and reduction of inequality. The talk will be using CopyrightX:NLUD, a seminar course offered at National Law University, Delhi in collaboration with Harvard Law School, as a case study in this regard. This course is a comparative copyright law course that focuses extensively on the US copyright law and Indian copyright law. I have been offering this course since 2015 and one of the important aspects of the course is the requirement that every student has to create a new Wikipedia page or improve an existing page on a topic in the area of copyright law. The quality of their contributions (including the interactions with editors, if any, for maintaining the accuracy of the pages) are evaluated and forms an integral part of the evaluation scheme of the course. The primary factor that prompted me to include such an assignment as part of the course curriculum was the clear lack of quality information pertaining to Indian copyright law on Wikipedia. Students are given the freedom to choose any topic/ page and the only condition for acceptance of a topic/ page suggested by them is the relevance of the topic for the general public. While some students chose specific issues within copyright law, some students write on landmark court decisions in the area. The diverse topics covered by students in this regard include copyright issues relating to memes, street art, and copyright societies in India (see the below links).

Apart from discussing the diverse experiences in this regard over five years, the talk will also try to highlight the challenges involved and the scope of extending similar approaches to other areas of law/ disciplines.

Supporting work

Optional:

Relationship to the theme

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

This talk will address in particular how inclusion of Wikipedia in the course curriculum contributes to quality education (SDG4) and reduction of inequality (SDG10).

Session outcomes

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

Increasing awareness about the importance of Wikipedia related assignments in course curriculum

Increasing awareness about the challenges of including Wikipedia related assignments in course curriculum

New Wikipedia pages and better Wikipedia pages

Relation to other Spaces

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

Room:

A classroom or a lecture hall with a projector and screen

Audience:

No restrictions with regard to the number of people who can attend/participate in this session. No prior knowledge is required to attend the session.

Recording:

Yes, recording and sharing of videos under open licenses are encouraged.