New subject: starting a Teaching with Wikipedia program in Korea

16 Aug 2013

Hi guys,

I am Piotr Konieczny (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus), I've 
come to Korea in February and I work as a professor of sociology at 
Hanyang University. In US I've been doing a lot of teaching with 
Wikipedia 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects/User…), 
and I'd like to do so here as well. After my first Spring semester I 
have however came to the conclusion that while my lectures are in 
English, my students English skills are not good enough for them to 
focus on contributing solely to English Wikipedia; therefore I'd like to 
have them contribute at least partially to Korean Wikipedia. As I cannot 
speak Korean I would need assistance from some Korean speakers who would 
like to become Campus Ambassadors 
(https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Campus_Ambassador). I 
wonder if there are any Korean Wikipedians who would like to assist me 
with this?

I can train people to become Campus Ambassadors (it's not difficult, I 
just need to spend one few hour session with you showing you some case 
studies and tools), and then we would practice in my courses this Fall. 
Ambassador duties would be primarily related to interacting with 
students (in Korean Wikipedia in Korean), making sure they are doing 
constructive and on topic edits, and they have somebody to ask for help. 
Coming to class twice or so during the course term to meet with students 
in person, answer their questions, and such, is helpful, too. This is 
not a very demanding activity, I'd estimate that it shouldn't take more 
than 10 or so hours of your time for the entire semester, 20 at max 
(that counts the initial training, travel time for physical meetings, 
and time spent online interacting with students). Starting Spring, 
hopefully, we may be able to recruit other professors; I plan on holding 
a workshop about this for interested faculty, but I cannot do so until 
after I have at least some confirmed Korean-speaking ambassadors to help me.

For Wikipedia, this means more active editors and more articles. In US, 
my students were able to produce about ~20 Good Articles on English 
Wikipedia and few dozen other nice articles over the ~4 or so years I 
was teaching there.

For those of you who become CAs, in addition to helping Wikipedia, this 
is also something to add on your CV (good for teaching careers, good for 
those planning on studying abroad as it helps to show innovative extra 
curricular activities), and WMF may send you swag like shirts, stickers, 
bags and similar goodies. So, particularly for those of you who are 
currently at the university, think of it as a good career move. This is 
not only for students (although majority of CA begin as students). If 
you are an academic instructor (professor), this is good for our 
careers, too (I am speaking from personal experience here, too). If you 
are a teacher and would like to get on board of this, I'd be happy to 
help you out, too.

Let me know if you are interested in this, ideally I would like to meet 
with interested volunteers in August. I will have two classes each with 
~30 or so students contributing to Wikipedias (English and Korean) 
beginning in September and I really hope to get some assistance from 
Korean Wikipedians for that.

Cheers,

-- 
Piotr Konieczny, PhD
http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus