Meet this month's featured Wikimedia & Education community member: Jacek Durski
Author: Klara Sielicka-Baryłka, Education Specialist, Wikimedia Poland
Social Media channels or hashtags: #EduWikiLeaderSeries
Summary: Starting November 2019, we are highlighting a Wikimedian who is impacting or who has been impacted by Wikimedia & Education work. For May, In this article meet Jacek Durski from Poland and learn from their experience in running Wikimedia education activities in High schools.
This month's nomination comes from Klara Sielicka-Baryłka, Education Specialist from Wikimedia Poland, who introduces us to Jacek Durski:
Jacek (user: Durski) runs classes on creating materials (articles, photos) at the 10th High School I.J. Paderewski in Katowice. He conducted his first lessons in 2013. Since then he has conducted dozens of lesson hours, and even more individual consultations, joined by a group of 30 students each year. He joined Wikipedia over 15 years ago, while was writing my master's thesis and from object-oriented databases. This field of IT in Poland has just crawled. There were hardly any Polish-language publications. Which is when he started creating his first articles. Some of them were only brief explanations of each definition.
In 2013, He took the high school youth to photography workshops in the Upper Silesian Ethnographic Park in Chorzów. There were also Wikipedia users (EwkaC, Yarl and Karol007). They urged course participants to publish their photos on Commons.
After a successful workshop (mentioned earlier), He decided to repeat it a year later with a new group of students. Both editions of the workshop showed the great potential of students. In high school he ran classes according to his own curriculum. It allows him to modify the topic of the class. He decided to include Wikipedia classes permanently in this program. The purpose of this class is to show Wikipedia mechanisms, editing rules, copyrights etc. Every year, students collect materials, take photos and then create new articles related to their region. Here is the high school project`s website: https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Projekty_szkolne_i_akademickie/X_LO_w_Katowicach
Do you know of a great member of the Wikimedia education community that we should meet? Nominate them for a feature by following this! For more information contact spatnaik
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