Education/Newsletter/October 2014/Bulgarian students will explore Wikipedia in a new lecture course on "New Media and Participatory Culture"

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By Spiritia and Laveol (Bulgarian Wikipedia)

Snippet: Bulgarian university offers a Wikipedia research course.

Prof. Nelly Ognyanova and Vassia Atanassova with the students of the "New Media and Participatory Culture" course. 16 October 2014

In the 2014/2015 academic year, Wikipedia will become again the core subject of research in a Bulgarian university lecture course. After the "Wikipedia and Wiki Technologies" course in Plovdiv University, now the topic of Wikipedia is introduced in the "New Media and Participatory Culture" lecture course for the students in "European Studies" major in Sofia University, read by the prominent media law expert Prof. Nelly Ognyanova.

The lecture course aims to present the new media - blogs, social networks and new interactive forms of information dissemination and communication. Traditional and new media are compared in search of answers to the questions about the democratization of media in the digital society, about new media as instruments of civil participation, as well as regarding their performance in their mission to inform society.

Every year, guest lecturers from the areas of traditional and new media, journalism and creative writing are invited to take part: professor on cultural anthropology Prof. Ivaylo Ditchev, writers Georgi Gospodinov and Marin Bodakov, journalist Polina Paunova.

In the 2014/2015 edition of the course, the invited guest lecturer is Vassia Atanassova, PhD (User:Spiritia), administrator of the Bulgarian Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and she will be assisted by Wikipedia editor Petar Galev, who is a PhD student of Prof. Ognyanova. Their aim will be to teach students of the specifics of Wikipedia and its place and role within the ecosystem of new participatory forms of media, of sharing knowledge as a way to live and consume media content, as well as the critical thinking needed to survive in the jungle of web information. Students will be given the chance to get thorough hands-on experience by writing articles in Wikipedia, by contributing with freely licensed illustrative content, as well as with investigations of the use and appearance of Wikipedia in news, court cases or academic studies in Bulgaria.

Read more about the educational Wikimedia projects in Bulgaria here.