Education/Newsletter/June 2014/News from Tec de Monterrey, Mexico City Campus

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Students working with Wikipedia for community service, summer 2014

By Leigh Thelmadatter (Wiki Borregos)

The past month has been busy at Tec de Monterrey. A new group of students doing their community service hours have been trained and have begun to do projects. Unlike last semester, when almost all the students opted for translation and photography projects, there are already three accepted projects to write new articles in Spanish Wikipedia. Most of the students are from the economics and finance majors, but there are also several in music engineering and digital animation. The first digital animation project, a demonstration of how a rook moves in chess, has been added to Commons and can be seen here. One change from last semester was more formal training sessions, two days, five hours each, culminating in doing a short translation from en.wiki to es.wiki. Most of the community service hours will be completed by the creation and completion of larger tasks/projects such as creating article, images and illustrations, but there are also four F2F sessions for the group to work on smaller, but equally important tasks such as reviewing each others' articles, sorting and improving descriptions in Commons and updating infoboxes in articles on Mexican municipalities.

Global Studies professors and librarians at Wikipedia workshop on June 6

Working with Wikipedia is growing the campus and beyond, with its inclusion in academic work now labeled as "Wiki Learning" for the Tec de Monterrey campus system. (See “Wiki Learning” to be adopted at Mexico’s Tec de Monterrey ). On May 26th, Dr. Lourdes Epstein and Leigh Thelmadatter presented at the Monterrey campus as part of the VIII Congress on Educational Research, Innovation and Management (VIII Congreso de Investigación, Innovación y Gestión Educativas). The presentation was a brief general review of Wikipedia work on the Mexico City Campus along with observation and survey results from the first full complement of students working with Wikipedia to fulfill community service hours required of undergraduate in Mexican universities.

This was followed on June 6 by special training session offered to the Global Studies Department of the Mexico City Campus in order to encourage professors to plan and pilot Wikipedia/Wikimedia based projects for the upcoming fall semester. This session lasted for four hours and was attended by eight professors and one librarian from the neighboring Santa Fe campus. On June 12, Lourdes, Paola and Leigh gave their first report on the progress of Wiki Learning to a major meeting of innovation projects held at the Tec de Monterrey, Puebla Campus.