Can this global open education community contribute during OEWeek (and beyond) to the crises of war in the Ukraine? Yes!
We have a call from @margreta to help with the learning needs of refugee learners- can we quickly gather relevant OER, expertise to assist?
Wikimedia Commons image by UP9 licensed CC BY-SA
Respond there or here with ideas, suggestions, offers to assist.
@margreta - this is a great initiative!
The Wikimedia Community has been running a Ukraine Cultural Diplomacy Month to ensure there is coverage of Ukraine across Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. There might be some useful resources here - and, of course, people can also get involved and add to it?
Also in the Wikimedia world - the Wiki Loves Women SheSaid campaign on WikiQuote is always hugely supported by the Ukraine Wikimedian Community. There are wonderful quotations by Ukrainian women or other women in Ukraine.
YES! Do we know exactly what resources are needed/wanted? Grade levels? Subjects?
Not yet Amanda. I am hoping we hear back from @margreta after the meeting she described with more details on what they might need. But at this point, any general collections, organizations, or examples are a good starting point.
Thanks for the “YES!”
A possible organizational contact is the Manitoba Parents for Ukrainian Education (MPUE).
They have a web page listing links for Ukrainian Language Resources For Students that seem to be a mix of web sites and video links.
There are bilingual Ukrainian education programs in Alberta. I will pass on the message and see what I can find.
Thank you so much for your interest in this. It is, of course, much bigger than my Norwegian context, and that is why I posted here. Ukrainian refugees will need learning resources of every type, on every level, in every country that welcomes them. But of course, children are more vulnerable (as always) than older students, because it is not so easy for them to search for relevant material on their own.
At the meeting with the Norwegian Directorate for Education yesterday, it became clear that they initially wanted to hear from all content producers to see what was possible and what people had to offer. So they had no specific demands. What will be a problem, is to get enough skilled translators - to translate existing material from Norwegian to Ukrainian. At NDLA, we are looking at machine translations also - as a short term solution. However, if there exists material in Ukrainian out there - no translation is needed.
That sounds really interesting! Fingers crossed! And thank you!
Looks great - I’ll pass it on!
I’ve heard a few places that given the large number of Canadians of Ukrainian descent, language programs there are likely many especially in the center provinces that might be able to help with translation. The questions are “what ought to be translated”?
Also noting that there are over one million Wikipedia articles in Ukrainian maybe there are ideas out there on ways these night be easily organized / re-mixed / repurposed as useful OER.
I posted a question about ideas for reusing Ukrainian Wikipedia content in another activity where @vahidm is answering questions about using Wikipedia for learning – he introduced me to an interesting open source platform Kiwix that enables download/access of Wikipedia content for reading offline.
Just so you know, you are already helping. I passed the link to the Canadian pages @cogdog shared to Norwegian authorities, that were very grateful. If, as you say, there are large Ukrainian communities in Canada, maybe Canadian authorities are willing to do some curating, so that the global community will have an easier way to navigate and find relevant resources for their context? Do anyone have connections from Canadian Educational Authorities?
When it comes to translating, I think that for children, it is most urgent to have access to open resources in Ukrainian. Then there will be a need that each country must answer, and that is type “Welcome to Norway/Canada/France…”-resources, with information about the country they have arrived in - at different levels.
Just as an example what is possible, see what medical educators at McGill University did to create quickly medical / trauma training materials including instructional videos with Ukrainian narration… produced in 24 hours!
This would be good to know what information is needed about the countries welcoming refugees.
Is there any overlap with the articles about the countries in Wikipedia (ones in Ukrainian)?
I am looking at the Wikipedia page for the refugees crisis
Ukrainian refugee crisis (2022–present) - Wikipedia (not available in Ukrainian, I see more of a portal page for information sources)
But I see the list of countries having announced being open to refugees and wonder if some clever use of Wikidata could connect that to the information page for each country.
Or on the sidebar of the Crisis pahe are category links to things like Immigration to Poland and Immigration to Slovakia
It seems like with community expertise in both Wikipedia and perhaps translation, something could be done (all of this conjecture on my own limited experience).
Don’t forget the language resources available through the COERLL network, there may be something here of use?
Somewhat related, at least on the archiving front–
Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO):
We are a group of cultural heritage professionals – librarians, archivists, researchers, programmers – working together to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions while the country is under attack. We are using a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Browsertrix crawler and the ArchiveWeb.page browser extension and app of the Webrecorder project
So also this story from the Internet Archive on the work of SUCHO.
This came up in a session this morning (well I brought it up) where there was conversation about Wikipedia’s important role in OER.
@Paola mentioned active work in the Ukraine right now to digitize art and cultural artifacts, mentioning archivists working in “basements” under bombs falling, doing all they can while there is electricity.
I hope she can share more, all I found so far beyond the SUCHO initiative above is an article in the Globe and Mail
I hope more can chime in with ideas what open educators can contribute / do.
For more on SUCHO…
Hi @cogdog, Hi everyone,
I am in contact with one of our ENOEL members; she lives in Dnipro, lately in the basement of her home with family members (grandchildren and daughters-in-law). Here is what she wrote to me in one of her last messages: “Ukrainian librarians, despite often unbearable conditions, continue to work remotely and physically in their institutions (if possible). But we are still working in groups of volunteers: we bake pies, weave camouflage nets, help people in need get medicine, clothes, water, food. There is enough work for everyone.” “Of course, as far as possible, in the conditions of frequent lack of electricity, communications, air raids and missile attacks, we continue our library work.” “Libraries provide training in emergency medical assistance. The libraries were fitted out as hostels, points of assistance to displaced persons who are forced to leave their homes.” So: maybe sharing OER related to emergency medical assistance might help? And other very practical subjects related to emergency situations? Most of all if in video format, as far as they are able to download them. As an example, there is a doctor, Dr Nelya Melnitchouk in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who is recording videos about how to stop the bleed (Training Video: How to Stop the Bleed - Навчальне Відео: Як Зупинити Кровотечу і Врятувати Життя - YouTube). This is not a CC-licensed video (maybe they do not know about licenses), but at present time I think any resource like this might be helpful. If there are videos like this one that can support people who do not have medical skills, it would be helpful to share. If they are OER, even better.
Thanks for sharing this direct connection. I thought the story from McGill University was promising, but everything points to “soon to be available on the McGill platform”
Just some scouting here…
Okay here is a downloadable OER on Emergency Trauma
Less related to emergency situations, I was peripherally part of this BCCampus open text on Vital Sign Measurement
African Health OER Network: Advanced Emergency Trauma (might be same course as above)