On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 2:24 PM, James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A few things that IMO would make a difference:
1) The profs themselves must edit Wikipedia (preferably having brought
something to GA or FA within their subject area). And if we are going to go
with large classes than so must their teaching assistants. The only way to
learn how Wikipedia works is by editing content.
2) There must be a number of hours of in class instruction on Wikipedia's
policies and procedures. One does not begin writing for the New England
Journal of Medicine without first learning their manual of style and
referencing requirements.
3) If classes are working on content they should concentrate
on improving the quality of one or a few articles. Assignments such as "go
out and make an edit to the subject area of this class" should not be
repeated.
I think the focus of routing classes into English Wikipedia is a mistake.
One of the best, best uses I have seen of WMF in a classroom setting was in
a psychology class, who were non-disruptive in their editing and created
featured content. Where was this done?
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cognitive_Psychology_and_Cognitive_Neuroscience.
Take a look at it. Beautiful work. Seriously beautiful work.
(There has also been awesome work done on Wikinews and Wikiversity. None
of this was disruptive, and it was done with community knowledge and
support. The DYK community was not consulted about student DYKs. The
instructor had about a week for students to submit to DYK. This same
professor wants students to submit works for GA. I've had articles sit in
the first one about a month waiting for a review, and I believe I am going
on close to two months for GA reviews waiting.)
I do like your suggestions. I think one could be done with a bootcamp for
professors before they design their class syllabus and where professors are
given suggested lesson plans for how to use WMF projects in the classroom
in order to meet learn objectives in the class. (Yes, I know, on the
university, professors generally do not draft lesson plans. I've had
several conversations with various academics about the merits of this on
that level in order to help students excel.)
On the issue of teaching assistants, I think this is extremely important:
We need to do away with the campus ambassador programme. It needs to be
replaced with a Teaching Assistant/Graduate Assistant process. If students
are going to be required to be non-voluntary editors in topic areas not of
their choosing, they need to be properly guided by highly skilled
Wikimedians who understand they will be in a teaching/assessing role.
This is discussed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#Policy_for_compensa….
This needs to be paid for by the university participating. This
level
of supervision is really, really required, especially given the
non-voluntary editing component.
Point two: Yes, they need to be familiar with that. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#DYKs_and_students.
These non-voluntary editors are not reading the rules and are not
incentivized to read them. One student nominated an article for DYK that
had been taken from around 3,000 words down to 1,000 words. Another
student nominated an article that would have required expanding the article
16,000 words. These clearly did not even pass the most basic DYK expansion
test... yet submitted. (The ambassador did not review the DYKs before
submission, no one from the programme stepped up to review additional DYKs
to help clear the student generated cue... and a lot of stress was put on a
system that is often under scrutiny. A DYK review these days at times is
tantamount to GA-lite.)
Point three: Yes. We appear to have a number of articles on the five
personality components created. They do not appear distinct. Before a
class does any work, the professor needs training to make certain what they
are requesting is feasible.
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