Professor Jasper Kim (Graduate School of International Studies) calls it a Youtube for documents. Ohmydocs!, an academic English Web Site where documents are freely uploaded for the people and by the people, makes a clever attempt to “flatten” knowledge with easily accessible intelligence online. A friendly orange screen greets any of those who reach for helpful knowledge, regardless of age or social class.

 

Ohmydocs! has four basic categories for uploaded documents – Academic, Business, Career, and Other. According to Kim, it has a basic aim: creating a sturdy knowledge base online. Documents of all sorts, ranging from distinguished New York Times articles to guidelines on academic writing fromPurdueUniversityare all just a click away.

 

“In, English is now sort of the new elite class filter. Many companies look for high English language capability scores, even though the job itself may not necessarily require it.,” said Kim, founder of Ohmydocs!. “Also, when knowledge was accessible only to elites, the global society was bifurcated into the very rich and educated and the very poor and uneducated.” To lessen the gap, he made sure the site was written in “plain English” was and  accessible to various users worldwide.

 

Ohmydocs! comes with various side benefits. “First, you can effectively ‘publish’ your article instantly by uploading. Second, you are effectively participating in global knowledge transfer, a form of global community service, by contributing. Third, you can receive helpful comments and reviews for your work, in case you’re seeking peer review. Fourth, you can make your mark in society by ‘sharing your knowledge’ instead of having it e-waste away in your old hard drive forever,” said Kim.

 

Current Korean users are mostly students from Ewha,YonseiUniversityandSeoulNationalUniversity, but it also boasts a sturdy base ofinternational users. “A fair amount of the Ohmydocs! Users – what I call, Ohmydockers – are international from places like , , , Hong Kong, , and the. You can call the users the ‘United Colors of Ohmydocs,’” said Kim. Since Ohmydocs! launched only a few weeks ago, hundreds of new uploads are on the Web Site already. “In fact, there’s so many uploads, we may have to get another server to support all the files.”

 

Ohmydocs! was designed and created with the help of several creative ideas from a number of Ewha students, mostly from the Division of International Studies, and ultimately an inspired sketch on a yellow pad. The visual and technical elements are created as to make the barriers to uploading as minimal as possible. Once a username ID is made, a swift click on “Upload Now” enables anyone to contribute to the knowledge base of Ohmydocs!. Documents of the four categories can also be viewed freely. The site holds most types of documents such as MS Word, Powerpoint, PDF and Excel. “The entire process is designed to take less than a minute,” said Kim.

 

Kim’s future plan for Ohmydocs! is to build a unique online community, where knowledge and a way to enhance English writing and presentation skill are easily found.

 

“The larger the community, the more the knowledge that can be shared,” said Kim. “Contributing your knowledge to Ohmydocs! is a form of global community service or corporate social responsibility. I’m hoping that people, especially Ewha students, will upload whatever documents they think others may find useful onto Ohmydocs!. To receive, one must give – that’s my belief and this philosophy in part is what Ohmydocs! is predicated upon.”

 

 

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