Education/Newsletter/January 2014/Articles of Interest in other publications
- Egyptian students help close gender gap
The Wikipedia Education Program Egypt is successful not only in adding a large quantity of high-quality content to the Arabic Wikipedia, but it's also successful at challenging the gender gap. Three female students, May Hachem, Eman Sawabi, and Amira El-Gamal, were profiled in a post on the Wikimedia blog written by Samir El-Sharbaty, the volunteer leader of the Wikipedia Education Program Egypt. Samir's post explains how May, Eman, and Amira are adding articles about women to help close the systemic bias that comes from a significantly male contributor base. Read the article.
- Students in Mexico contribute to Wikipedia, Commons
Leigh Thelmadatter, a Wikimedian, Regional Ambassador, and Professor at ITESM Campus Ciudad de México, contributed a post to the Wikimedia blog about the activities on her school's campus last term. International Baccalaureate students contributed content to Wikipedia as part of their coursework, and undergraduate students also wrote articles on Wikipedia, translated articles to the Spanish Wikipedia, and added photos and sound files to Wikimedia Commons. See more about the busy term by reading Leigh's post.
- Ole Miss offers open education class
A new graduate-level course at the University of Mississippi will be the first to add open components to a traditional course. Taught by Robert Cummings, the course features a two-week module covering open educational resources, or OER, and a six-week module in which students will learn to collaborate on Wikipedia articles. The course is open to Ole Miss students for course credit as well as to anyone who wants to participate in the course online. Learn more about the course.
- U.S. professor blogs about course experiences
University of Memphis professor Robert Connolly assigned his students to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their coursework for a class titled "Wikipedia as a Research Tool" last term. In a series of posts on his personal blog, Dr. Connolly writes about his students' experiences and highlights specific things he will change next time he runs this class assignment. Learn more about his experiences.
- Online Ambassador profiled on Wikimedia blog
Many professors and students in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States and Canada have interacted with Evangeline Han. An Online Ambassador since the first term of the pilot, Evangeline (User:Bejinhan) has helped hundreds of students make their first edits to Wikipedia. Even more impressive, Evangeline has done it all as a teenager. She started editing Wikipedia in 2009 at age 15, and she's become a prolific editor since then. Learn more about Evangeline by reading a profile of her on the Wikimedia blog.