Ive worked for some time here in Mexico with Wikipedia, doing everything from writing articles in English, to translation, to photography and subtitling projects in Commons.

I very much do recommend you contact the Czech education people, who are a great bunch and can give you invaluable hands-on support.

In my experience, I have found having students write new text in their non-native language to be extremely challenging, and you have to be sure that students are up for it.  Translation gives the basic structure (a +) but it also has problems with L1 interference in L2. (and vice versa but particularly problematic for L1--> L2)

If you are not sure if students are up for this (or you have the time), I have a couple of suggestions for experimenting...

1) Have students review articles in English on Czech topics for inaccuracies and/or out-of-date information and/or missing details or citations. The Visual Editor tool has made article improvement a bit easier, especially the addition of references.

2) Wikimedia Commons (commons.wikimedia.org) has videos in English that need subtitles. One teacher at my school Karen Mazanec, had students create English subtitles for English video as intensive listening practice.  https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Newsletter/April_2015/New_to_Wikipedia:_A_personal_perspective


Interesting to to get your mail today as I had a meeting where they are talking more about modualizing (not a word, I know)  courses. If you could send me a link about your course at Masaryk, I would appreciate it greatly.

Leigh



From: dnk@mail.muni.cz
Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 17:40:12 +0200
To: education@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] confirm 69ccb875820d9c89580605f70c3db83e8a426db7

Hello,

I am a teaching assistant in ONLINE_A, e-learning English course at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. This course is structured around students completing various English practice tasks and in that way gaining points towards credit. I came up with the idea to make writing a Wikipedia article one of those tasks. The course is relatively large, but since this is going to be one of the more difficult tasks available and only the more advanced students can actually do it, I assume there would be only about 6 to 12 students every semester doing this task. I would not be able to coach more of them anyways. The students are unlikely to have previous editor experience on WIkipedia. To accommodate for that, I plan to have them translate an article from Czech to English Wikipedia and instruct them to refer to an existing similar article on English Wikipedia to get a feel for what they need to create.

Example: Translate https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Tu%C4%8Dn%C3%BD as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michal_Tu%C4%8Dn%C3%BD referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Rogers as a source of inspiration.

I am looking for an existing Wikimedia Education initiative under which this initiative of my could be put into practice. I found "Studenti píší Wikipedii" at https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Countries/Czech_Republic. Is it the correct bunch of people to turn to, given that I target WIkipedia in English, not the Czech one?


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