Ive worked for some time here in Mexico with Wikipedia, doing everything from writing
articles in English, to translation, to photography and subtitling projects in Commons.
I very much do recommend you contact the Czech education people, who are a great bunch and
can give you invaluable hands-on support.
In my experience, I have found having students write new text in their non-native language
to be extremely challenging, and you have to be sure that students are up for it.
Translation gives the basic structure (a +) but it also has problems with L1 interference
in L2. (and vice versa but particularly problematic for L1--> L2)
If you are not sure if students are up for this (or you have the time), I have a couple of
suggestions for experimenting...
1) Have students review articles in English on Czech topics for inaccuracies and/or
out-of-date information and/or missing details or citations. The Visual Editor tool has
made article improvement a bit easier, especially the addition of references.
2) Wikimedia Commons (
commons.wikimedia.org) has videos in English that need subtitles.
One teacher at my school Karen Mazanec, had students create English subtitles for English
video as intensive listening practice.
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/April_2015/New_to_…
Interesting to to get your mail today as I had a meeting where they are talking more about
modualizing (not a word, I know) courses. If you could send me a link about your course
at Masaryk, I would appreciate it greatly.
Leigh
From: dnk(a)mail.muni.cz
Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 17:40:12 +0200
To: education(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] confirm 69ccb875820d9c89580605f70c3db83e8a426db7
Hello,
I am a teaching assistant in ONLINE_A, e-learning English course at Masaryk University,
Czech Republic. This course is structured around students completing various English
practice tasks and in that way gaining points towards credit. I came up with the idea to
make writing a Wikipedia article one of those tasks. The course is relatively large, but
since this is going to be one of the more difficult tasks available and only the more
advanced students can actually do it, I assume there would be only about 6 to 12 students
every semester doing this task. I would not be able to coach more of them anyways. The
students are unlikely to have previous editor experience on WIkipedia. To accommodate for
that, I plan to have them translate an article from Czech to English Wikipedia and
instruct them to refer to an existing similar article on English Wikipedia to get a feel
for what they need to create.
Example: Translate
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Tu%C4%8Dn%C3%BD as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Tu%C4%8Dn%C3%BD referring to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Rogers as a source of inspiration.
I am looking for an existing Wikimedia Education initiative under which this initiative of
my could be put into practice. I found "Studenti píší Wikipedii" at
https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Countries/Czech_Republic. Is it the correct
bunch of people to turn to, given that I target WIkipedia in English, not the Czech one?
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