1. New publication: «¿Cómo educar con Wikipedia?»
2. Virtual training for teachers 3. Content digitization
=== New publication: «¿Cómo educar con Wikipedia?» ===
With a clear objective of widening the resources aimed at teachers, to use Wikipedia in the classroom, Wikimedia Argentina has translated the document «Case studies: How professors are teaching with Wikipedia», originally produced by Wikimedia Foundation. The document goes through successful cases and different exercises that have given good results to teachers of different levels, especially in tertiary education. These cases are proof of how versatile Wikipedia is as an education tool.
With this brochure, we hope to increase the references available for teachers interested to work with Wikipedia. «¿Cómo educar con Wikipedia?» joins our collection of documents, formed by «Wikipedia en el aula», «Manual de bolsillo del Wikipedista» and the compliation of articles «Bicentenario de la Revolución de Mayo».
The Centre of Innovation in Technology and Pedagogics, in the department of Innovation and Academic Quality of Universidad de Buenos Aires, organized a massive virtual course focused on training teachers in new technologies, and learning new teachers' practices related with those. The course «Escenarios con tecnología: entre lo real y lo posible» began at the end of November and lasted till mid-December. Close to 2.500 Spanish-speaking teachers all over the world (counting amongst these, professionals from Albania and China), of which 200 took part of all the practical exercises suggested during the course.
The last week of November the course was dedicated to collaborative learning contexts, with an important emphasis on Wikipedia. We presented a video with Patricio Lorente and held a videoconference amongst Wikipedians and participants of the course. We opened a special forum so the people involved could revise articles on Wikipedia, suggest changes and talk with Wikipedia collaborators. The Wikipedia volunteers acted as tutors, teaching diverse aspects of Wikipedia, guiding through different editing stages and motivating the participants of the course to join the community. Through this real-editing experience, many people who had never edited the free encyclopedia before were able to do it for the first time, and other participants who did not edit actively were able anyway to know more about the encyclopedia.
After two weeks experience, 49 topics were created in the forum, which received 325 messages. New articles were created, like «Resignificar» and «Vito Campanella», while other articles were substantially improved, like «Wikinomía» or «Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas (UNMSM)», aside from a dozen other articles with minor changes.
=== Content digitization ===
All throughout the year, several institutions received a do-it-yourself scanner to digitize books. This has allowed different organizations to share their books on Wikimedia Commons. The library and documentary center «Feminaria», part of the Tierra Violeta Cultural Center, uploaded 43 books of its collection to Wikimedia repositories. This works greatly cover the feminist ideology books published in our country during the XX century. This collection has works by María Saez de Vernet, Rafael Barreda, Paulette Pax, Alfonsina Storni, and many others, and also has documents like «Civil rights of women», by Eduardo Padró and the International Feminine Congress transcripts, amongst others.
Some months ago, the Library of the School of Humanities and Educational Sciences of the National University of La Plata shared part of its archive on Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to the home-made scanner they received as a loan, they were able to upload 42 books to Wikimedia Commons. These cover very varied topics, such as agricultural sciences, rural history studies, books about Julio Cortázar, Borges and many other publications.
With this program, we not only promote the aperture of publications for their free spreading, but we also promote wiki culture within local institutions. The aim of bringing together these successful cases is, as well, to make an open call for volunteers that wish to collaborate in any of these projects. In some cases, the process of translating these scans to text has been started on Wikisource, but there are still many documents to transcribe. During 2014, these scanners will be moved to new institutions, thus we can bring the process of digitization further, and continue to promote Argentina's written heritage.