Wikipedia20, I'm celebrating the sidelined Wikipedians

Wikipedia20 animated lightning, illustration by Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. Animators: Kunal Sen & Tisha Pillai.

Today is Wikipedia's 20th birthday, and the largest encyclopedia in the world is being celebrated the world over. As a "veteran" Wikipedian myself - I've been a volunteer editor since 2007 - I woke up early this morning, feeling the urge to celebrate an aspect that has been overlooked in all the cake-baking and champagne-popping. 

I'm here to celebrate the editor who hit the "Edit" button to discover "hey, I'm being encouraged to edit!". So they made their first edit: it was no more than correcting a typo, or rephrasing a sentence so that it made more sense. Then they learned how to add references, then upload images to Commons and add them to articles.  And soon after, they got hooked: actually participating in building the sum of all human knowledge can be addictive for people who are passionate about evolving through knowledge. 

Then they proudly published their first article. And woke up the next morning to find it littered with notification tags: notability, citations and style were being questioned in ugly banners across what they had so painstakingly created. So they  discovered the discussion page, where their article was being discussed for deletion. There they interacted with the community, being as civil and polite as possible. Most members were equally kind in return, responding to the newcomer's queries about how to improve their article with patience and understanding. Some were vitriolic: the newcomer's questions kindled their need to spew irony and meanness. They got down to work on applying the advice given by the kind ones, some of whom even lent a helping hand by improving style and adding citations. When they had brought the article to a much better standard, they removed the notifications and there it was: an article that was even better than its original version, thanks to the help of their fellow editors. They waited a couple of days to see how their article would fare, and to their delight it was still sparkling clean, in fact a couple of editors had expanded it with great content. "Wow", they thought, "what an amazing place to be". So what if there were a few cretins: such is life. Look at all the wonderful things I've achieved, with the help of all these wonderful people. Forget the bad, keep the good. 

Then they ventured into discussion spaces. They started suggesting ideas for projects, inviting other editors to collaborate. Most members responded with enthusiasm: projects were launched, articles created, files uploaded to Commons. They discovered newsletters and social media groups to share their accomplishments. They started actively participating in discussions on the village pump, offering insight to problems newcomers were facing - they never forgot the help they had been offered as a newcomer themselves. But apparently they were becoming too good, and some editors didn't like that. They were changing the status quo, and change can only bring trouble: soon enough, they would be challenging the power balance in this microcosm of society. So they were ferociously attacked by the gatekeepers of stagnancy: a stagnant environment is easier to control, and those with control-seeking personalities combined with humongous editing stats will not allow anyone or anything to change it. 

But they persevered, and soon learned about offline events: they applied for a Wikimedia meetup and earned a scholarship. There they met amazing people from every corner of the globe and engaged in fruitful discussions. Their first event was followed by a second and a third, and soon they decided to assume volunteer responsibilities. Throughout the following events, Wikimedians would see them all over the place: helping out at registration, carrying projectors and conference packages, giving directions to the conference halls, doing anything in their power to make delegates happy and the conference run smoothly. But they had an exuberant personality: they were "loud", they often joked with people and patted them on the back. But some delegates didn't like that. So they were asked to step down from their volunteer capacity. Most of the delegates supported and comforted them, but the decision was not revoked and an explanation was not offered.

Broken and sad, yet still passionate about knowledge, they remained on the project, but in the sidelines: they no longer wanted to risk being exposed to hostility, either online or offline. They would work in "harmless" capacities, as there's always something valuable to do: put together a newsletter, copy-edit a blog post, review a project... so long as they were still part of the "sum of all human knowledge" vision. 

So on this day, 15 January 2021, I'm here to celebrate the Wikipedian who never made it past the yellow paragraph. I'm here to celebrate the Wikipedian who never made it past the blue paragraph. I'm here to celebrate the Wikipedian who never made it past the red paragraph. And I'm here to celebrate the Wikipedian who made it through yellow, blue and red, but now sits in the sidelines. 

And naturally, a wish is in order... so my birthday wish for Wikipedia20 is this:

Wikipedians are truly an amazing community. We are trailblazers, we are passionadas, we break boundaries of nation - colour - faith - gender. Yet there is one boundary we have yet to smash into a thousand pieces and leave that and only that in the sidelines of our movement: the boundary of POWER. If we could have our way,  we would obliterate power conflict from relationships, politics and every aspect of our lives. The least we can do is to delete it from our movement. Let's do it.

Happy 20th Birthday Wikipedia, and many happy returns 💓

[[User:Saintfevrier]]

Mina Theofilatou

Kefalonia, Greece

Why is an engineer passionately translating medical content on Greek Wikipedia?

In October 2017 I was admitted to an Athens hospital to have my gall bladder removed. Naturally, I had gone through all the necessary screening, and taken the special precautions due to the fact that I have a VP shunt in my head (meaning, I can't have surgery in a hospital without a neurosurgical ward, which meant the local hospital was out of the question). And naturally, I had read up on the laparoscopy procedure that would be applied. Having examined numerous Greek medical sites, including the cholecystectomy article on Greek Wikipedia, I was wheeled into the operation room in a cheerful mood, knowing that the whole procedure would only take a couple of hours... and convinced I would have no pain or complications and be released the next day, or couple of days at most. Surgery went perfectly well, and soon I was cheerfully chatting away with friends who had come to visit in my room... until around 9 pm, when the anaesthesia wore off and the pain started. Alright, I was expecting pain in the area of the incisions.. but this felt like my right arm was being chopped off at the shoulder. WHAT is this about??? When I asked the nurse, she casually replied:
- "Oh don't worry, it's because the gas they inflated into your abdomen for the laparoscopy is escaping, and pain in the right shoulder is quite common".
-  "Thank you Greek Internet for giving me the whole story", I thought.

Next day, complications set in: bile leak. WHAT is that??? None of the sites I had visited made any mention of it. So, naturally, I looked it up on my smartphone... and got scared stiff. This looked like a serious complication, and it was happening to me, and I had no idea what to expect. But I'm a rational person, so I'm not going to go crazy reading medical journals on case studies of bile leakage: I resorted to my e-mail network of friendly doctors whom I have met along the course of my family's complicated medical history. The friendly doctor told me what to watch out for and reassured me that the quantities of bile leak I was reporting to him were not alarming, but it did make sense that they were keeping me in to be monitored for several days. After a week the leaking stopped, but they had me stay in for another week just to make extra sure I wouldn't be having any issues in the peritoneum, which is where the bile was leaking (and which also happens to be where the shunt drains excess fluid from my brain). I am SO grateful that I had such excellent care from such diligent health professionals of the free and public Greek NHS*.

As the second week I was fully mobile and hospitalization was merely precautionary, I used the free time to start working on a project that I was contemplating for over a year, and which made even more sense after discovering first-hand how lacking impartial and reliable medical information is on the Greek Internet: translating medical content on the Wikimedia Projects into Greek. First step was to contact James Heilman from the WikiProject Medicine group. When we met in Esino Lario in 2016, he encouraged me to help them get the Wikimed offline app available in Greek. The time had come for me to begin.

The "office" I set up in my hospital room at "Red Cross Korgialeneio - Mpenakeio General Hospital" in Athens, Greece. Using my mobile phone and data plan as a wifi hotspot, I started by translating labels and descriptions of Wkidata medical items into Greek.

Five months later and I'm obsessed... I've made over a thousand edits, learned a lot along the way, and almost every day I discover a new reason that makes it even more meaningful .

But surely... wouldn't this kind of work be best assumed by a doctor, or someone in the healthcare field? Not an engineer! "What do you know about medicine?," I've been asked. And then they add the inevitable cliche: "and on Wikipedia? How reliable is a site where ANYONE can edit?"

The answer is: 
quite reliable. More than you may think.

I've been using the Wikimedia projects in my teaching for eleven years, and two years ago I trained mentally-ill patients to edit Wikipedia as an alternative therapy approach (more about Wikitherapy here). One of the main reasons I'm so passionate about the Wikimedia movement is that money-making is not involved anywhere in the process: from the cookie-free, ad-free interface to the five pillars of Wikipedia, this is about as impartial and commercial-free as you can get on the Internet.

So, to go back to the cholecystectomy... I re-visited the Greek article and looked at its history. One of the usernames seemed familiar: bingo, it was the name of the doctor whose site was #4 in my Google search. This surgeon has a private practice, so he needs to "advertise" laparoscopy as being painless and complication-free: the title of his page says "no pain or bleeding". Since he's been editing the Wikipedia article, he's obviously using the same story. 

Obviously, there is nothing I can do about this surgeon misleading people on his personal website... nor is it advisable to remove the content he added to the Wikipedia article, as he's not actually lying: just that he's giving half of the story. What I can do is give the other half. By adding and referencing the pain and complications that I experienced first-hand. Because if I had known the issues beforehand,  I would have been better prepared. So now that I have fully recovered, improving the article is the next priority on my Wikipedia to-do list... because I feel it's my duty to protect future patients who will want the full story.

There is a lot of value that a layman, albeit impartial, editor can add to Wikipedia. And that is why Wikipedia is nothing short of a knowledge revolution. And we need revolutions. Especially in a country that has been devastated by eight years of cruel austerity, and a consequent humanitarian crisis which has led hundreds of people to unemployment, poverty and despair. And if no-one is going to right the wrongs of lacking reliable and impartial medical information on its Internet... I will. On Wikipedia. Where anyone can edit**.

Mina Theofilatou
(User:Saintfevrier on the Wikimedia projects)
Electrical & Computing Engineer / Computer Science Teacher
Kefalonia, Greece


 *why didn't the surgeon who operated on me explain to me what was going on? He did, eventually...  but he's not the kind of doctor who explains. I can pardon such minor shortcomings: doctors in austerity-ridden Greece are nothing short of heroes. They are keeping the national health system - which is public and free to all - alive and kicking under conditions that would make other doctors run away in despair. Often the relatives of patients need to bring bandages and syringes to the hospital, and the waiting lists for surgery are long. But you will never see a Greek hospital closing its door on a serious incident that needs to be treated. Because it's public and free for all. And THAT is why National Health Systems need to be accessible to ALL citizens, and not just a fortunate few who can afford proper treatment. But don't take it from me: take it from the as of Wednesday 3/14 late Stephen Hawking. He said himself that he wouldn't be alive if it weren't for the NHS, which UK officials are now trying to break into pieces and give away to private interests...

** if there's anyone out there with working knowledge of Greek, and who is willing to help me make my mission come to fruition, but lacks knowledge and experience in editing Wikipedia... don't hesitate to reach out to me on my Wikipedia page or on social media. I'd be more than happy to show you the ropes :) 

Language and politics: my takeaways from Celtic Knot 2017

 Early July... I arrive in the UK after yet another heat wave in Greece, wearing a tank top and sunglasses. I had to run to catch the train from Manchester airport to Edinburgh and managed to hop on in the nick of time. Looking around me and out the window, I observe people wearing winter jackets, scarves and sweaters. Strange, I thought, as the cold hadn't really set in: a two-hour flight delay and the agony to make it on that train were more than enough to keep me feeling warm. Soon enough though, I put away my sunglasses, and put on a jacket to adjust to the cloudy and cold weather. This is crazy, I thought. It's JULY!!!.

The next evening I was at the University of Edinburgh's Library bar, joining the other delegates for a casual meet-up before the Celtic Knot Wikipedia Language conference got under way the next day. I introduce myself as Mina from Kefalonia, Greece; the group, who were already engaged in lively discussion about their native languages, responded with "Hi Mina. What's the story?"

I was soon to learn about the perils of people who identified as Welsh and Scottish in performing the self-evident: using their language and culture without being criticised or persecuted. I felt as if a window had been opened to a world I had never known, or even contemplated, until that moment. I could never have imagined that children were humiliatingly punished  for speaking Welsh among each other... in the seventies! In the UK! Of all ages... and of all places! So they were probably expecting a nasty tale of how Kefalonians were mistreated by the central government for using their local dialect. Not the case... in Kefalonia, as in all regions of Greece, we have a single language: modern Greek. The dialect and accent vary greatly from place to place, but that's about it. In Kefalonia it so happens that we have many Italian words in our local dialect, due to centuries of Venetian rule when most of Greece was under Turkish occupation. But a Greek from Kefalonia will perfectly understand a Greek from Crete (and so on)... though it is highly likely that if you have two Kefalonians (or Cretans etc.) casually chattering away with one another, a Greek-speaking individual from a different region will most likely have difficulty keeping up with the conversation, and will eventually need a bit of translation!

Soon enough I start talking about my own projects as a Computer Science teacher in Kefalonia. My newly met Welsh friends showed interest in our Wild Flora project, so I passed over my smartphone for them to peruse the app we had developed in class. A few minutes later, I was reprimanded: "the app is in English! Why isn't it in Greek?" They only calmed down after I explained that we made the app in English first for it to be used by Israeli schools interested in exploring Mediterranean  biodiversity, and that the Greek app would follow soon. "OK you're excused... but only because you're using English as a means to an end!" That was more than enough to make me feel perfectly at home among this passionate bunch.

During the conference I was to soak in more and more passion for a whole lot of languages I knew very little or nothing about: Gaelic in Scotland... Basque and Catalan in Spain... a handful of different flavours of Sami in Norway... and their Wikipedias. Turns out that there are Wikipedia versions for many more languages than we normally encounter in our travels. The only such case I was familiar with was Pontic Greek, spoken by Greeks who used to live in the Black Sea area, and with its own Wikipedia, albeit not yet having reached the 500-article mark. It was astounding to learn that Catalan was the second Wikipedia to be created, right after English Wikipedia. That Welsh Wikipedia has almost 100,000 articles. That Scotland has not one, but two Wikimedians in Residence: one at the National Library of Scotland and another at the University of Edinburgh. The drive behind the individuals volunteering and working to keep the essence of their identity alive and kicking, is amazing.

But my trip to Edinburgh wasn't all about language: it was my second visit to this magical place and I managed to get in a good deal of sightseeing, mostly by wandering through the Old Town and climbing all the way up to Calton Hill (such amazing contrast: dramatic yet serene). Whenever I travel abroad I'm always curious to catch on to Greek being spoken on the streets, and there was quite a lot of it: not so much as in Manchester, but Greeks are there. Greeks are everywhere actually, after the EU-imposed crisis started to tear apart my country in 2010, and well-educated Greek professionals started abandoning their homeland by the thousands, in seek of a better future.

The National Monument of Scotland: built to resemble my country's iconic Parthenon. Left unfinished for nearly two centuries. Nicknamed "Scotland's Disgrace". I find it beautiful:)

Walking around a town at 55 degrees latitude in July, donned in winter clothing, was surreal. Even though my stay in Edinburgh lasted merely 48 hours, I caught myself thinking "this is paranoid. I don't know what to call this, but it is definitely NOT July". That's how a Greek feels in UK weather, especially in the summer: anything but normal. I came to actually appreciate our heatwaves: they are insanely uncomfortable, but hey, they feel normal. And feeling normal is important. So, imagine a Greek who has left his country not by will, but by need. Because the unemployment rate is so high that even if he does manage to put his painstakingly-earned Ph.D. to use, he will be receiving a salary that Western Europeans would laugh at. I was explaining this to a Welsh delegate during the Celtic Knot lunch break... "so then you have a brain drain going on", he concluded. I stopped to think for a minute, and replied "No. You can't call it that. You would say it's a brain drain if there weren't enough professionals to fill the vacant job positions. There are no job positions for professionals in Greece. Greek education is public and free from Kindergarten to University. A Medical School graduate will nowadays most likely seek employment in Germany or the UK. So the German or British state will have acquired a doctor without spending a single pound on educating her; her education was paid for by the Greek state. Which is supposedly the culprit in the supposed Greek bailout. In which money wasn't donated to us; it was lent to us at criminal interest rates. It's lose-lose for us, win-win for the EU".

Which brings me to "language and politics". One thing I was surprised to discover at Celtic Knot was how fond of the European Union most of the British delegates were (pardon me my dear Welsh, Scottish and Irish friends for any derogatory connotations in "British": using the term merely for convenience:-). The EU supports indigenous language and culture via its various funding programmes, so it can hardly be viewed by them as hostile. The United Kingdom, on the other hand - and its violent assimilation of everything Welsh, Irish and Scottish into a single British culture - can.

So there you have it: two flip sides of the same coin. The EU as a vehicle to promoting language and cultural diversity. The same EU financially crushing a member-state and reaping 500,000 of its state-educated native professionals in seven years. The UK as a vehicle to employment and dignity for thousands of Greek professionals. The same UK crushing the indigenous language and culture of three of its countries, and forcing thousands of natives to use English to conduct their daily business.

Epilogue?

What better way to close a post about a Wikipedia conference... than a Wikipedia edit. Wikipedia in the synecdoche sense, anyway... so here is my first ever contribution to English Wikiquote:

'There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.' 

By the Catalan novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

And to elaborate on the political aspects: they WANT our minds in a constant dormant state. They, as in "the system" and its greedy, all-assimilating accessories. Perhaps awareness of the workings of assimilation in the cultural/language domain, can lead to better understanding of how the same methods work in other capacities. Employment-driven migration, for instance. Wouldn't it be great if the Wikimedia projects were explored as a tool to tackle both? Just food for thought...

Many thanks to Ewan McAndrew for inviting me to present at the Celtic Knot Wikipedia language conference, after the enthusiastic comment I left on a University of Edinburgh "thinking out loud" page soon after my first visit to Edinburgh in March 2017. Susan, Jason, Duncan, Robin, Dafydd et al... it was great to meet you. John, it was great to see you again. And as suggested by Duncan... here's to the next Wikipedia Language Conference being held in Kefalonia. We may not have the mystery, drama and medieval charm of Edinburgh... but I promise you, our July weather is much more enjoyable :)

Mina Theofilatou
Computer Science Teacher
Wikimedian (User:Saintfevrier)
Kefalonia, Greece

A NOble cause.

 I was born to Greek parents in Canada and grew up in the United States. When I was 13 my family moved to Greece. Form the age of 13 to the age of 43 – for 30 years – I lived in a country I grew to love. I studied, worked, traveled, married (twice) and had two children… without ever cheating or stealing or snatching rights and special privileges from others. I worked with passion; I became financially independent and built a career in the profession I chose to follow. And finally I reached a point where I was proud of the way my life was going and the principles that had led me along the way; and I conveyed these principles to my children.

And then Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou and his “socialist” PASOK came along to state the notorious “the money exists” and win the 2009 election. But a few months later – on April 23^rd 2010 from the remote island of Kastelorizo, an image I’ll never forget – he announces to the Greek people that there is no money and we will be receiving a bailout from the IMF to avoid going bankrupt. A year and a half later, Papandreou was dismantled from his position as PM and a non-elected prime minister (Papadimos) took his place. And so begins the dismantling of democracy…

And after the 2012 election, the formerly “anti-memorandum” Samaras joins forces with other formerly anti-memorandum albeit power-hungry politicians from an even farther extreme right party ( Adonis Georgiadis from LAOS) and the "left" (Fotis Kouvelis) and all together they begin the dismantling of society, under the blessings of the EC-ECB-IMF. And I found myself with a 40% slash in my salary (same with my husband, only he’s now been unemployed for 7 months). In a dead market, which has eliminated even the slightest chance of earning extra income from translations; an occupation I legitimately exercised (with all the necessary financial statements, VAT etc.) for years before being appointed as a teacher. At the age of 45 I couldn’t afford the flat I was renting with my second family anymore, so we moved in to my parents’ home. And we counted our blessings for actually having a house to move in to, as many others in our place did not have this “luxury” and ended up homeless.

We soon got used to our new living situation, and continued our hard-working, honest lives… but now our anger against the "leaders" who had thrown us into humiliation and compromise to less and less – always with the blessings of the EC-ECB-IMF – was raging. And I searched, and I read, and I reached my conclusions. And on Sunday I will cast a furious NO. After everything they have stolen from me, our so-called friends are now trying to rob me of my dignity. It’s the last thing I have left, and I refuse to hand it over to them, and I don’t care if that means we’ll be kicked out of the EU and the Eurozone. The one thing they can’t do is kick us out of Europe; geography and culture are much stronger than the hypocrites that come across as the leaders of the European (dis)Union while having trodden down fundamental human rights and ideals in the country that gave birth to the continent's very name.   

The mainstream media have been bombarding us and the world with images of people queuing at ATMs to withdraw their daily 60 Euro “capital control” limit, in an effort to convince us of how tragic the situation in Greece currently is. What I know is that people queuing in line for free meals is a much more tragic scene, and it’s been going on for years… plus these people couldn’t care less if there is a curfew on withdrawals, quite simply because they have nothing to withdraw.

This is certainly not the first instance in history when Greeks have had to rise to challenging circumstances, and the NO road is certainly a bumpy one. But we owe it to our ancestors, who never hesitated to heed the call for democracy, liberty and national sovereignty over and over again. We owe it to our children, who carry a debt tag from the day they are born in a country ridden with cruel austerity and injustice. And we owe it to the victims of this crisis, who buckled under the despair and took their own lives. 

We’re in for rough times…. but with our heads up high, and for a NOble cause.

Introducing Computer Science to lower secondary pupils: the seven-segment display

Today was my first day teaching at a morning lower secondary school (I've been teaching to adults in secondary for 7 years). Naturally I wanted to introduce myself and break the ice, turned out I already knew some of the pupils or they knew me so we spent five minutes on casual chit-chat then I told them we had to get down to business. They weren't really thrilled about the option of opening their textbooks, so I told them: "Let's play a game instead". I drew a digital 8 on the board and asked them what it was. "8" some said, "electronic 8" said another, "digital 8"! "Perfect! " I said and continued: "Have you ever wondered how the digital display of a watch works? Hear me, this is University stuff here: I was taught this in Electrical Engineering!" They caught on right away.

I told them that the "8" I had drawn on the board was called the "seven-segment display. Count the segments and see for yourself!" I then named each segment with a letter from the English alphabet and proceeded to draw a table with the ten digits of the decimal system as rows and the letters a-g as columns. The idea is that when a segment is ON, the value in the cell of the table is "1". When a segment is OFF, the value is "0". I then asked who wanted to come to the board and fill in the cells for the decimal digit "0". I covered the middle segment with my hand as a hint, all of them raised their hand and the pupil I chose entered 1-1-1-1-1-1-0 in the row. Excellent! Now all of them wanted to give it a try: 1 was easy, 2 was a bit tricky so I drew a digital 2 on the board and they got it, 3, 4, the pupil doing 5 was having a hard time so I told him "just put "1" in the cells that are ON and then fill in the zeros". He managed, 7 was fine (I explained that a universal 7 doesn't have the little horizontal line in the middle like they learn in Greece, but they had all seen digital sevens and already knew that). I called the pupil who was having trouble with the 5 to do the 8 as a "giveaway". After 9 was on the board I told them that they had just grasped the concept of how ALL information can be coded into digital functions. OK, I couldn't go any further than that - not that they would have much difficulty in understanding the fundamentals of Boolean Algebra or Switching Theory, just that we would be getting WAY off track! - but I think I made my point. When the bell rang they didn't want to leave! So I told them next chapter is about computer hardware and promised "open-heart surgery" on a "deceased" computer...:-)

I took a picture of the whiteboard with my cellphone:)

 Note: The wonderful world of digital technology all around us is the #1 testimony to Computer Science as exactly what it is: A SCIENCE. In most countries this is self-evident and needs no further explanation... Not in Greece. Computer Science teachers struggled to show the Greek Ministry of Education as well as European Union education agencies how eliminating SCIENCE from Computer classes in Greek secondary education and downgrading to merely learning computer skills would be detrimental to the "added value" offered to pupils by studying Computer Science. Unfortunately the law bill for the "New Lyceum" is now a law, and "Computer Programming" is no longer in the curriculum for University Entry Exams: those pupils wishing to pursue Computer Science degrees in Tertiary Education just don't have the option of studying Programming in High School like they did for the past 15 years. Instead, they have to attend Chemistry classes. Chemistry is fine, but a computer-technology oriented curriculum is far more appropriate for those students who are determined to pursue a career in Computer Science. It was an exemplary practice that was successfully in place for 15 entire years in Greek education, and it was torn down in one night in late August. The Minister still hasn't provided an answer to the question asked by bewildered Computer Science teachers and students: WHY??? It's a giant step backward, as noted by the Executive Director of the Computer Science Teachers' Association in the CSTA blog post on 26 Aug. 2013. Greek CS teachers have not surrendered: by channeling all our creativity and passion for what we do, we're proving in the classroom what the Ministry refuses to see. And there are many on our side: students, parents, University professors, entrepreneurs... the Ministry may be blind to the future, society is not.

Ευρωπαϊκή και Αμερικανική συμπαράσταση στον αγώνα μας για τα ΑΥΤΟΝΟΗΤΑ στην Πληροφορική Παιδεία

Ακολουθούν οι απαντήσεις στην επιστολή μου από Προέδρους Διεθνών Ενώσεων Πληροφορικής και Πληροφορικής Παιδείας. Αξίζει να σημειωθεί ότι οι κ. Aceto και Stephenson τονίζουν ιδιαίτερα τον ρόλο που μπορεί να παίξει για την έξοδο της Ελλάδας από την οικονομική κρίση. Διαβάστε και διαπιστώστε μόνοι σας ότι κάνουμε αγώνα για αυτά που θεωρούνται ΑΥΤΟΝΟΗΤΑ στις προηγμένες χώρες:

κ.Luca Aceto, Πρόεδρος του EATCS (European Association for Theoretical Computer Science)

Dear Mina,

I have received your message and, on behalf of the EATCS, send you the following piece of text that expresses the view of our organization on this matter.


The EATCS opposes the elimination of ICT courses from the upper high-school program, as announced in the intended Greek Government reform termed "New School". Computational thinking is going to be just as important a basic skill as reading, writing and arithmetic.

The EATCS notices that digital literacy, and especially the teaching of ICT, is a very important element for the growth of the Greek economy (and, in fact, of any modern economy).

Therefore, instead of eliminating ICT from upper high school, the Greek Government should in fact reinforce the teaching of Informatics to young students.cience

Luca Aceto

President of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science





Ο κ. Stephenson, Διευθύνων Σύμβουλος της Computer Science Teachers' Association με έδρα στις Η.Π.Α., έκανε ειδική ανάρτηση στο blog της CSTA για το θέμα της Πληροφορικής Παιδείας στην Ελλάδα:

Greece Proposing Giant Step Backward

Anyone who has followed the international news for the last couple of years has likely heard of the ongoing economic crisis in Greece. Only now, however, are we hearing about how that crisis is directly impacting education in the form of a new piece of legislation that will eliminate key Informatics (information technology and computer science) courses.

A new bill entitled New Lyceum is currently under public consultation and it is expected to be submitted in final form to the Greek Parliament at the end of this month. If the new legislation passes, it will eliminate the Information and Communications Technology classes from the general upper secondary curriculum in Greek schools.
CSTA members in Greece tell us that this proposed legislation is the latest in a series of national money-saving efforts which have specifically targeted teachers. According to Mina Theofilatou, who teaches Informatics at the secondary level in Argostoli, Greece, these efforts have been both extreme and frightening:
Each time the state "runs out of money", new measures need to be taken in return for the next loan instalment. Teachers were one of the easiest targets: first our salaries were slashed by approximately 40%. Then they increased our working week by 2 hours, and threatened to relocate us to any place in Greece if we were identified as "surplus" in our own region ... Finally, when we started discussing a strike in reaction to all these unfair measures, they proceeded to issue a mobilisation order against us, served to each and every one of us by a policeman at our school or worse yet, our doorstep.
More recently, says Theofilatou, the government began firing teachers in a effort to cut 15,000 civil service jobs in order to meet the current loan installment. The firings began with the elimination of 46 technology courses at the secondary level, resulting in the loss of many teachers' jobs. The New Lyceum legislation is seen as an attempt to create similar employee reductions by eliminating computing courses.
Educators in Greece are attempting to lobby the Ministry of Education and the Greek Members of the European Parliament, but it is difficult to say at this point whether their efforts will have any effect.

Chris Stephenson
Executive Director, CSTA


Ευχαριστώ τους κ. Aceto και Stephenson για το χρόνο που διέθεσαν να διαβάσουν την επιστολή μου και να τοποθετηθούν πάνω σ'αυτή. 

ICT classes eliminated from "New Lyceum" in Greece

Monday 12 August 2013

To:

Marc Durando

Executive Director

European Schoolnet

Brussels

Cc:

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Subject: ICT classes to be eliminated from upper secondary education in Greece

Dear Mr. Durando,

My name is Mina Theofilatou and I am writing in the capacity of teacher of Informatics in Greek secondary education. Perhaps my name rings a distant bell: I had the honour of receiving from you the first prize in the poster competition at the 1^st Scientix Conference in Brussels in May 2011[1].

Needless to say, the prize was a great honour, and unexpected too, as the theme of the conference was closely linked to the STEM European Schoolnet projects running all over Europe, whereas my poster was about my students’ contributions to Wikipedia since 2007: I had no idea Wikipedia was on European Schoolnet’s “agenda”.  It was however a priority for the Greek Ministry of Education: 2011 was dubbed by the Ministry as the “Year of the Digital Encyclopaedia[2]” and editing workshops were held all over the country to promote Greek Wikipedia as a learning tool, especially to upper secondary – higher education audiences[3]. Moreover, throughout the past two years the Ministry has been trumpeting Digital School initiatives[4] for incorporating ICT and “blended learning” in secondary education. It should come as a surprise then that 2 years, 3 title changes[5] and numerous “digital school” initiatives later, the Ministry is planning on eliminating ICT classes from general upper secondary curriculum in Greek schools.  

The much discussed law bill for the “New Lyceum” (upper secondary) saw the light of publicity late Friday night: ICT teachers were shocked to learn that two of the classes they taught, namely “Communications Technology” in 2^nd Grade of Lyceum and “Application Development in a Programming Environment” in 3^rd Grade would no longer be available to students who had chosen to pursue a career in Engineering & Technology sciences. These classes were taught for the past 14 years to pupils who had selected “Technology orientation” in the last two grades of secondary school, while ADPE was one of the lessons examined at a national level in the context of Greek Tertiary Education Entry Exams. So what became of all these revolutionary digital initiatives so ardently promoted by the Ministry? Could going back to the University Entry System practiced some 20 to 30 years ago[6] be credulously integrated into a law bill for the NEW Lyceum?

In the member-states of the European Union keeping pace with the Information Society and the Digital Age of the 21^st Century[7], such a time warp to the past would sound unimaginable. In Greece under crisis however, one can easily draw conclusions by plain watching the news on TV or the Internet. For the past 3 years we have been bombarded by disaster scenarios related to our country being in a bankruptcy situation and in desperate need of external financial aid and reforms to balance the fiscal deficit. Ruling politicians have done little to go through with the reforms that have been identified as necessary in the “Memoranda of Understanding” that have been signed between the “Troika” and the Greek government, for fear of “political cost”; this means that each time the state “runs out of money”, new measures need to be taken in return for the next loan instalment. Teachers were one of the easiest targets: first our salaries were slashed by approx. 40%[8]. Then they increased our working week by 2 hours, and threatened to relocate us to any place in Greece if we were identified as “surplus” in our own region[9]. Finally, when we started discussing a strike in reaction to all these unfair measures, they proceeded to issue a mobilisation order against us, served to each and every one of us by a policeman at our school or worse yet, our doorstep.[10] In other words, the act of THINKING has pretty much been penalized (with help from mainstream media, who have thrown “tons of mud” our way).

Now our rulers have drawn the last straw: the government has started firing teachers “cold-turkey”. The government is in a constant chase to dismiss a total of 15,000 civil servants by the end of the year; this has been imposed as a requirement for the disbursement of upcoming loan instalments. As no reformative measures (combatting bureaucracy, fighting tax evasion, rational allocation of personnel on the basis of transparent evaluation results etc.) have ever been successfully deployed for fear of political cost as mentioned earlier, the only “legal”[11] solution they can resort to is eliminating job positions. Less than a month ago, 2122 technical secondary school teachers[12] were dismissed, with absolutely no cause or warning. How did they pull it off? By eliminating 46 different courses in technical secondary education literally overnight: not a single study had been carried out in the direction of indicating that these courses were unpopular (quite the contrary!) or unviable. Naturally, the job positions of the teachers working in schools offering these courses were eliminated as well.

But it’s a long way still to the 15,000 limit, and teachers are easy targets: we are often described in the media as lazy, arrogant and incompetent[13], so the government expects little reaction from the general public. Which brings us back to the New Lyceum: in order to get rid of hundreds more teachers, they blatantly intend to send upper secondary students back to the “Dark Ages”.

This why I – we! – are appealing to you. In a country where tax evasion is still riding high[14], where the infamous “Lagarde list”[15] has been ridiculously presented by one involved politician after another as “lost” or “misplaced”, where politicians and their protégées continue to live an opulent life, the scapegoat to their incompetence will be EDUCATION. Pupils will be deprived of the option to follow a technology-oriented curriculum at school with lessons such as programming and communications (which will most certainly affect their choice of career) and ICT teachers will see the years they have spent promoting knowledge, technology and innovation in their classrooms go to waste, and their own decent living a memory of the past. If not for any of the above, by helping us you will justify the objectives of the European Commission “ICT in schools survey[16]” and the “Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs[17]”: digital jobs cannot be created where digital education is at risk.

The law bill is currently under public consultation and it is expected that the final bill will be submitted to Parliament at the end of August. We kindly request of you, in your capacity as Executive Director of European SchoolNet, to take regard of the points put forward in this letter and support our case with the Greek Ministry of Education. As we have received no valid answers from the people planning these supposedly innovative changes, we are counting on European education institutions to press for such answers. In particular, we would really appreciate an explanation for the following:

What is the rationale behind eliminating constructive ICT classes such as “Application Development in a Programming Environment” from upper secondary school curricula, especially when the changes are supposedly being introduced as “innovations” in the name of the NEW Lyceum?[18]

This letter shall be communicated to mass media in Europe; in addition, it shall be translated into Greek and communicated to all involved parties as well as mass media in Greece. Education and digital literacy cannot be the scapegoat to a system incapable of timely and justly coping with crisis.

In closing, I believe you will find the following video of interest: it is a national television interview on a mainstream news show. Pavlos Charamis, Chairman of the Research and Documentation Centre of the Greek Secondary Education Teachers’ Federation, explains the reasons computer programming was eliminated from secondary school curricula. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1xl0kMIU7E (with English transcription).

Thank you very much for your time. I am naturally at your disposal for any other information/input you may need.

Kind regards,

Mina Theofilatou

Electrical & Computer Engineer

Teacher of Informatics in Secondary Education

Evening Secondary School of Argostoli

Argostoli, Kefalonia

Greece

Many thanks to my colleagues at “P.E.KA.P” (Hellenic Association of Computer Science Teaches) for providing ideas and input for this memo (see “PEKAP” Facebook group, https://www.facebook.com/groups/210307492345/)

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[1] http://www.scientix.eu/web/guest/conference/competition

[2] http://www.minedu.gov.gr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2298%3A02-03-11-2011-etos-psifiakis-egkyklopaideias&catid=69%3Agenika-eggrafa&Itemid=144&lang=el

[3] The Wikipedia editing guide I had written for my pupils was made freely available and was adopted for the purposes of the “My Wikipedia” campaign: http://mycontent.ellak.gr/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/mywikipedia-tetradio.pdf

[4] http://digitalschool.minedu.gov.gr/manuals/sxoleio.php

[5] In the past 4 years, the Ministry of Education has changed name three times: from “Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs” (1974-2009) it was renamed “Ministry of Education, Lifelong Learning and Religious Affairs” (2009-2012, “coincidentally” within the core period of LLP 2007-2013 funding), then “Ministry of Education, Religious Affairs, Culture and Sport” (2012-2013) and then to its current “Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs”. It has been estimated that each change is equivalent to a cost of €500,000 (new signs, stamps, letterheads etc. for 15,000 schools) http://www.protothema.gr/greece/article/206443/poso-tha-kostisei-h-metonomasia-toy-yp-paideias/ , meaning a total of €1,500,000 over a period of four years, three of which officially under national financial crisis.

[6] Throughout the eighties and nineties the entry system was based on 4 orientations, with 4 special lessons each and no ICT classes, as they were practically non-existent then: the new system shall be quite the same. http://www.tovima.gr/society/article/?aid=507072

[7] See “Informatics education: Europe cannot afford to miss the boat”, Informatics Europe & ACM Europe Working Group, April 2013.

[8] As an example, my monthly salary was 1260E (5-year engineering graduate, 2 children, C2 foreign language and 7 years of experience in 2011) plus benefits (approx. 2000E/year), now it’s 890/month and no benefits.

[9] If the draft presidential decree is approved, many teachers – myself included – will be forced to resign, as they cannot afford to be distanced from their families!

[10] see my blog post http://agrypnocoma.blogspot.gr/2013/06/this-was-not-accepted-for-publication.html

[11] According to the Greek Constitution, a legally appointed civil servant with a clean administrative record can be dismissed only if the agency he is employed with is abolished. 

[12] Tables with names of the dismissed teachers: http://www.koutipandoras.gr/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Diathesimotita.pdf . Some 250 of them possess postgraduate degrees. Article about a teacher with 20 years of experience and who had received an excellence award three years ago from the then Minister of Education Anna Diamantopoulou: fired as well. http://panosz.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/success-story-10/

[13] There was uproar against Greek teachers when they reacted against the extra two hours per week. On first thought, it does sound reasonable; on closer investigation and considering a previous  average of 20 hours teaching per week (plus office work which is mandatory but not counted), the augmented schedule will mean that 1 out of 10 us will now be considered redundant by the government, which was their intention in the first place. Plus the “compulsary relocation” clause was carefully concealed from the public.

[14] Interesting article on mind-mapping tax evasion in Greece, and how it led nowhere (English) http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/05/144747663/how-a-computer-scientist-tried-to-save-greece

[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagarde_list

[16] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-341_en.htm

[17] https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/grand-coalition-digital-jobs-0

[18] An explanation they may produce is that two hours/week of ICT have been introduced into 1^st Grade. They may however choose to conceal the fact that this class will be a selective one involving the teaching of ICT skills (not Informatics), and that this selective was already in place for almost a decade in 1^st and 2^nd general until it was eliminated 2 years ago, only to be “halved” and reintroduced – most likely with the same outdated textbook – in the New Lyceum. This can hardly be called a victory for innovation.