I'd also direct you to this page on Outreach wiki, where the Global Education Program lives. It links to the various online trainings available to help onboard you and your students. https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Trainings
Thanks. The trainings page will be very useful, both for the teachers and the students of the course.
On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 3:51 PM, Kleefeld, John john.kleefeld@usask.ca wrote:
Jirka, you may want to consider having your students review each other’s work. This might take some of the load off of you and enhance the students’ learning experience. Or you can make even more work for yourself by also grading them on their peer reviews. :-)
I'll keep this in mind.
On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 6:26 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
Is there a specific reason why your students are supposed to translate from the native language to English, and not the other way round?
It was just the first idea that occurred to me and I did not have a specific reason in mind. If I have to come up with one post hoc, I'd say that students in the course do not share a common native tongue. They mostly speak Czech or Slovak, but there is a sizable minority of Erasmus students and such like. Having them translate into their native tongue means I may need to work with multiple Wikipedia language mutations, not just one. And with languages I do not understand myself.
Writing for English Wikipedia is very difficult even to English
speaking students. If the text quality of the contributions is (too) low,
Leigh Thelmadatter already persuaded me it was a bad idea.
A text must be curated afterwards. At least for a couple of days, the students should be online and accept feedback in order to improve the texts. This time must be planned in your schedule.
A very good point. I see (now) I must tell this to the students. Otherwise I might end up polishing their work for them, or deleting it altogether.
I hope this does not sound too pessimistic. :-) Also, I would advise to consider to let students something else do that "writing an article". I think that that is something a beginner should not start with.
Any suggestions, anyone? I need to come up with an activity that produces some "deliverable artifact". (If it comes to it, the deliverable might be just a short writeup about what they were working on...) Then again, I am not sure language learners can do a lot to improve English Wikipedia, for reasons you said yourself. And I probably cannot assign them some menial clerical tasks...
If someone is interested, I could report about experiences with regard to German students translating from English.
I would like to know how much support the students need, both in learning their way around WIkipedia and then during the translation itself. What I am dealing with is an e-learning course without any face-to-face class time whatsoever. My current idea is to have students go through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Training/For_students (and giving them a quiz for points after each module, to keep them motivated) and explain any questions they have afterwards in an online discussion. From your experience, would it be enough?
Hello Jirka,
Experience shows that for many students, producing text of their own is very difficult. The difficulty rises if they have to do that in a foreign language. Translating seems to take away that problem, giving the students an "easier" task. Maybe it is still too difficult if the students have no training in translating.
All experience shows that students (or other people) hardly collaborate. If we give them specific tasks to check their mates' articles, they do that pro forma but without much energy. They need an instruction how to do that and an incentive (e.g., that they get extra points for correcting).
At least some students like to do the so called "identity management": they produce a text in order to express themselves, their own ideas, their own judgement. They like to blog about what they personally think about a movie or a book.
What we expect people to do in Wikipedia is "information management". Especially an encyclopedia needs a neutral point of view. Improving and updating texts is as much important as writing them in the strict sense. This is a very different approach to knowledge. Nearly all people are absolutely not interested in doing that.
Also: to correct others requires the students to assume a role they don't like, they have to play a little bit the role of a teacher over their classmates. Many don't go hard on the texts of others, hoping that their own texts are not critisized too much either.
I had the advantage that my students were native speakers of the language in which they had to write. I also did not let everybody in class write, only those who volunteered. Mostly that was just a small minority. The other students were participants of "traditional" work groups to explore about Free Knowledge etc.
The results of the "article writers" were usually fine. At the end of the seminar, they reported in a presentation about their "way to the article", about the challenges and what they learned. This was very beneficial for all students, to hear from their co students themselves that writing a Wikipedia article is quite a lot of work, what you have to consider etc.
A suggestion: how about that you take a public wiki, e.g. Wikiversity or Wikia, and prepare there the structure of a "The Foreign Students' Guide to Brno". Students get tasks to write articles about places they recommend to visit. They can write with passion and choose their topics. In a second step, they have to correct each other texts (for spelling or anything else that is important to you). If the texts are public and possibly even have a use for other students, the incentive to write and to improve texts might be higher than normal.
Kind regards Ziko
2015-05-23 10:59 GMT+02:00 Jirka Daněk dnk@mail.muni.cz:
I'd also direct you to this page on Outreach wiki, where the Global Education Program lives. It links to the various online trainings available to help onboard you and your students. https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education/Trainings
Thanks. The trainings page will be very useful, both for the teachers and the students of the course.
On Fri, May 22, 2015 at 3:51 PM, Kleefeld, John john.kleefeld@usask.ca wrote:
Jirka, you may want to consider having your students review each other’s work. This might take some of the load off of you and enhance the students’ learning experience. Or you can make even more work for yourself by also grading them on their peer reviews. :-)
I'll keep this in mind.
On Thu, May 21, 2015 at 6:26 PM, Ziko van Dijk zvandijk@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
Is there a specific reason why your students are supposed to translate from the native language to English, and not the other way round?
It was just the first idea that occurred to me and I did not have a specific reason in mind. If I have to come up with one post hoc, I'd say that students in the course do not share a common native tongue. They mostly speak Czech or Slovak, but there is a sizable minority of Erasmus students and such like. Having them translate into their native tongue means I may need to work with multiple Wikipedia language mutations, not just one. And with languages I do not understand myself.
Writing for English Wikipedia is very difficult even to English speaking students. If the text quality of the contributions is (too) low,
Leigh Thelmadatter already persuaded me it was a bad idea.
A text must be curated afterwards. At least for a couple of days, the students should be online and accept feedback in order to improve the texts. This time must be planned in your schedule.
A very good point. I see (now) I must tell this to the students. Otherwise I might end up polishing their work for them, or deleting it altogether.
I hope this does not sound too pessimistic. :-) Also, I would advise to consider to let students something else do that "writing an article". I think that that is something a beginner should not start with.
Any suggestions, anyone? I need to come up with an activity that produces some "deliverable artifact". (If it comes to it, the deliverable might be just a short writeup about what they were working on...) Then again, I am not sure language learners can do a lot to improve English Wikipedia, for reasons you said yourself. And I probably cannot assign them some menial clerical tasks...
If someone is interested, I could report about experiences with regard to German students translating from English.
I would like to know how much support the students need, both in learning their way around WIkipedia and then during the translation itself. What I am dealing with is an e-learning course without any face-to-face class time whatsoever. My current idea is to have students go through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Training/For_students (and giving them a quiz for points after each module, to keep them motivated) and explain any questions they have afterwards in an online discussion. From your experience, would it be enough?
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