Education/Newsletter/September 2014/Working with Wikipedia expands at Tec de Monterrey
By Thelmadatter (Wiki Borregos/Wiki Learning)
Fall 2014 Wiki activities have begun at Tec de Monterrey, with a new group of students doing mandatory community service hours (servicio social) as well as new teachers exploring the possibilities that Wikimedia has to offer. Servicio social students are a group of twenty, including two students who were permitted to repeat a semester working with Wikipedia, a welcome change in servicio social policy. This group has already translated and written over forty articles for Spanish Wikipedia, as well as uploaded about 100 photographs.
Efforts to train professors over the summer have led to commitments by seven to work with the platform, mostly at the Mexico City Campus. Training of students from these classes has already begun. Teachers repeating work with Wikimedia include Laura Perez, who has students start with Wikipedia as part of a web quest. Goals for this semester include creating text and images not only for Wikipedia, but also for Wiki How and You Tube. Professor Jesús Herrera has his German IV students translating articles from German into Spanish, mostly dealing with German culture and history. This is first education project translating between these two languages. The students are MercedesFV95, Juan Escalona Santiago (translating Jan Mauersberger), Iris Lilián DB and Jemand FD (translating Scharfenberg)
Projects are in the planning stages with three English classes, one graduate course and one undergraduate course in communications, and two composition classes.
Three primary schools which already with the the Mexico City campus in the Mati Tec program [1] have agreed to expand efforts into working with Wikipedia, in a project called "Wiki Mati." Inspired by the documentary "The Web" by Michael Kleiman [2], children at these schools will be documenting the neighborhoods (colonia) where their schools are located. This documentation will be done in text, photographs and even sound recordings, using Spanish Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and the schools' own official blogs (for first-person information such as interviews). The pilot is set to select 10 students from each school, being chosen through a contest where they use their Mati Tec cell phones to photograph the local neighborhood. The aim here is to find the most motivated students for the project. Sessions to train teachers at the schools as well as Mati Tec volunteers in working with Wikipedia have already been scheduled for the coming week.