Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga < ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 9:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia < guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com> wrote:
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
I'd argue the opposite. We should be shooting for English 101 classes, where the emphasis for the course can be put not on content development, but on learning the writing process, learning the assessment process, and where greater freedom is allowable for students to edit in content areas they feel comfortable in.
The problem with say a 300/400/500 level psychology course is Wikipedia has its own sets of processes. You cannot necessarily demonstrate domain level knowledge on Wikipedia to a professor. If there is any requirement for students to submit DYKs and GAs, the instructional objectives then need to be changed from learning content to learning the process. The easiest way to get 300/400/500 level classes to do valuable work on Wikipedia will not be content creation and submitting articles for assessment but rather, teaching the students HOW TO ASSESS content and having them participate in the assessment process as subject area experts. Otherwise, student work can and will be failed at DYK, at GA, will possibly be AfDed. Will they fail there because they do not understand the content? No, but because they fail to understand how to navigate Wikipedia's writing policies, content policies and behaviorial policies.
Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a *lot* of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could be prevented on the campus side of things: *before *the in-hindsight cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made *compulsory*. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia < guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com> wrote:
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga < ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Hi Sonia,
Thanks a lot for your feedback!
You're saying "a lot of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible". Are you referring to this term (spring 2012)? Currently, we're having 1,300+ students in the program – did you take a sample? (of the students? of their edits?)
I'm asking because it took us actually a lot of time and number-crunching when we were looking into the quality of the contributions lately. We finally compared the students who participated last term (fall 2011) with a group of randomly selected newbies. Our researchers looked into the survival rate of the content, which was actually significantly higher for the students than for the control group. The results of that research will be published next week. With that said, if you have a better method of measuring this, I would really appreciate if you could share it with me (either on or off-list). Ideally, we would be able to improve our methodology based on your input.
You're also saying "Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them". How many classes out of the 61 that are currently participating is it exactly? Again, if you could share the data with me (frank[at]wikimedia.org) – I would really like to look more into this.
Thanks again,
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 16:45 schrieb Sonia Newton-Shostakovich:
Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a lot of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could be prevented on the campus side of things: before the in-hindsight cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made compulsory. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote: That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org wrote: Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
My thoughts:
Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed users tools to facilitate this.
http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may be too late to do much about them.
Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for articles.
I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that certain measures are good for every student int he program.
Agreed. I think it's a great idea to have a kind of "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester. Did you know that Pharos started an 'Educational peer review' process recently?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Educational_peer_review_requests
I really like the idea and it could be a significant improvement when it comes to giving the students feedback. I would be more than happy if this kind of initiative was successful.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts, Derrick!
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 19:27 schrieb Derrick Coetzee:
My thoughts:
Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed users tools to facilitate this.
http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may be too late to do much about them.
Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for articles.
I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that certain measures are good for every student int he program.
-- Derrick Coetzee User:Dcoetzee
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Sonia Newton-Shostakovich though.poppies.blow@gmail.com wrote: Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a lot of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could be prevented on the campus side of things: before the in-hindsight cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made compulsory. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote: That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org wrote: Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Derrick & all,
Another thought: how do we want to handle issues where some part of the program (be it an entire course or a Campus/Online Ambassador) is having problems? Let's face it – not every student will contribute the same quality content. Although we know through surveys that many of them are highly motivated and have a lot of respect when it comes to see their own words appear on a medium that they're using almost daily, some of them will still underperform. And also the other way round: not every Campus/Online Ambassador is on the same level or has enough time to support the students as needed.
So, getting back to Sonia's case: how can we make sure that we handle issues effectively? Would it be beneficial to create a page (e.g. "Wikipedia:Education program noticeboard") where both community members and instructors could flag issues? I guess it would be a good first step _to be aware_ of issues like the one that Sonia is referring to.
Part of what Rob Schnautz is doing as a contractor is to look into the students' contributions (by taking reasonable samples) and to flag issues to other members of my team. How about if we did this in a more collaborative way and started a page like the one I suggested above?
Would that be more effective?
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 20:05 schrieb Frank Schulenburg:
Agreed. I think it's a great idea to have a kind of "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester. Did you know that Pharos started an 'Educational peer review' process recently?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Educational_peer_review_requests
I really like the idea and it could be a significant improvement when it comes to giving the students feedback. I would be more than happy if this kind of initiative was successful.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts, Derrick!
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 19:27 schrieb Derrick Coetzee:
My thoughts:
Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed users tools to facilitate this.
http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may be too late to do much about them.
Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for articles.
I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that certain measures are good for every student int he program.
-- Derrick Coetzee User:Dcoetzee
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Sonia Newton-Shostakovich though.poppies.blow@gmail.com wrote: Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a lot of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could be prevented on the campus side of things: before the in-hindsight cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made compulsory. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote: That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org wrote: Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Such a noticeboard would be great, if made easy for community members to find! It'd mean centralization of everything from a single problem student through to an ambassador going on wikibreak whose courses need extra eyes, and that's a good thing in my book.
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Frank Schulenburg < fschulenburg@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Derrick & all,
Another thought: how do we want to handle issues where some part of the program (be it an entire course or a Campus/Online Ambassador) is having problems? Let's face it – not every student will contribute the same quality content. Although we know through surveys that many of them are highly motivated and have a lot of respect when it comes to see their own words appear on a medium that they're using almost daily, some of them will still underperform. And also the other way round: not every Campus/Online Ambassador is on the same level or has enough time to support the students as needed.
So, getting back to Sonia's case: how can we make sure that we handle issues effectively? Would it be beneficial to create a page (e.g. "Wikipedia:Education program noticeboard") where both community members and instructors could flag issues? I guess it would be a good first step _to be aware_ of issues like the one that Sonia is referring to.
Part of what Rob Schnautz is doing as a contractor is to look into the students' contributions (by taking reasonable samples) and to flag issues to other members of my team. How about if we did this in a more collaborative way and started a page like the one I suggested above?
Would that be more effective?
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 20:05 schrieb Frank Schulenburg:
Agreed. I think it's a great idea to have a kind of "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester. Did you know that Pharos started an 'Educational peer review' process recently?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Educational_peer_review_requests
I really like the idea and it could be a significant improvement when it comes to giving the students feedback. I would be more than happy if this kind of initiative was successful.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts, Derrick!
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 19:27 schrieb Derrick Coetzee:
My thoughts:
Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed users tools to facilitate this.
http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may be too late to do much about them.
Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for articles.
I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that certain measures are good for every student int he program.
-- Derrick Coetzee User:Dcoetzee
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Sonia Newton-Shostakovich < though.poppies.blow@gmail.com> wrote:
Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a *lot* of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could be prevented on the campus side of things: *before *the in-hindsight cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made *compulsory*. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia < guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com> wrote:
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga < ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
I agree, such a noticeboard would be really valuable - a couple caveats:
1. Let's not end up with a proliferation of noticeboards, all poorly watched. One central board for all WEP concerns is fine for now, and if it gets too noisy it can be split on-demand. 2. Let's make sure that *all* Wikipedians are welcome to discuss concerns with WEP students, or in fact any students editing as part of a class, at the noticeboard. One way to encourage this is to put it in its own place in project space, rather than buried under the WEP page.
Since the concerns my ideal board covers are slightly broader than the WEP, I'm suggesting that we create it at a location like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard
I could create this and outline its purpose at the top. Any thoughts?
-Derrick
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 8:45 PM, sonia newton-shostakovich < though.poppies.blow@gmail.com> wrote:
Such a noticeboard would be great, if made easy for community members to find! It'd mean centralization of everything from a single problem student through to an ambassador going on wikibreak whose courses need extra eyes, and that's a good thing in my book.
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 3:40 PM, Frank Schulenburg < fschulenburg@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Derrick & all,
Another thought: how do we want to handle issues where some part of the program (be it an entire course or a Campus/Online Ambassador) is having problems? Let's face it – not every student will contribute the same quality content. Although we know through surveys that many of them are highly motivated and have a lot of respect when it comes to see their own words appear on a medium that they're using almost daily, some of them will still underperform. And also the other way round: not every Campus/Online Ambassador is on the same level or has enough time to support the students as needed.
So, getting back to Sonia's case: how can we make sure that we handle issues effectively? Would it be beneficial to create a page (e.g. "Wikipedia:Education program noticeboard") where both community members and instructors could flag issues? I guess it would be a good first step _to be aware_ of issues like the one that Sonia is referring to.
Part of what Rob Schnautz is doing as a contractor is to look into the students' contributions (by taking reasonable samples) and to flag issues to other members of my team. How about if we did this in a more collaborative way and started a page like the one I suggested above?
Would that be more effective?
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 20:05 schrieb Frank Schulenburg:
Agreed. I think it's a great idea to have a kind of "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester. Did you know that Pharos started an 'Educational peer review' process recently?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Educational_peer_review_requests
I really like the idea and it could be a significant improvement when it comes to giving the students feedback. I would be more than happy if this kind of initiative was successful.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts, Derrick!
Frank
Am 16.04.2012 um 19:27 schrieb Derrick Coetzee:
My thoughts:
Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed users tools to facilitate this.
http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may be too late to do much about them.
Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for articles.
I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that certain measures are good for every student int he program.
-- Derrick Coetzee User:Dcoetzee
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Sonia Newton-Shostakovich < though.poppies.blow@gmail.com> wrote:
Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a *lot* of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could be prevented on the campus side of things: *before *the in-hindsight cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made *compulsory*. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia < guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com> wrote:
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga < ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
I agree, such a noticeboard would be really valuable - a couple caveats:
- Let's not end up with a proliferation of noticeboards, all poorly watched. One central board for all WEP concerns is fine for now, and if it gets too noisy it can be split on-demand.
- Let's make sure that *all* Wikipedians are welcome to discuss concerns with WEP students, or in fact any students editing as part of a class, at the noticeboard. One way to encourage this is to put it in its own place in project space, rather than buried under the WEP page.
Since the concerns my ideal board covers are slightly broader than the WEP, I'm suggesting that we create it at a location like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard
I could create this and outline its purpose at the top. Any thoughts?
-Derrick
Sounds good to me. How can we make sure that people who raise issues on that page will get actual help? It would be too bad if this was just a page for complaints (instead of also including a meaningful way of encouraging positive action).
Frank
I agree that this would be a great step forward and could make the recall process simpler.
--Guerillero
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:08 AM, Frank Schulenburg < fschulenburg@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I agree, such a noticeboard would be really valuable - a couple caveats:
- Let's not end up with a proliferation of noticeboards, all poorly
watched. One central board for all WEP concerns is fine for now, and if it gets too noisy it can be split on-demand. 2. Let's make sure that *all* Wikipedians are welcome to discuss concerns with WEP students, or in fact any students editing as part of a class, at the noticeboard. One way to encourage this is to put it in its own place in project space, rather than buried under the WEP page.
Since the concerns my ideal board covers are slightly broader than the WEP, I'm suggesting that we create it at a location like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard
I could create this and outline its purpose at the top. Any thoughts?
-Derrick
Sounds good to me. How can we make sure that people who raise issues on that page will get actual help? It would be too bad if this was just a page for complaints (instead of also including a meaningful way of encouraging positive action).
Frank
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Hey all, I have now created:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_noticeboard
Brief description from the header:
---- Purpose of this page: This page is for discussion of students editing Wikipedia as part of their assigned coursework, with a focus on participants in the Wikipedia Education Program.
It is for incidents that require rapid feedback and attention. These include:
* Students deploying articles that have quality problems and need cleanup. * Students whose ambassadors have gone missing and need guidance or support. * Cases of incivility or conflict between ambassadors and faculty/students. * Cases of incivility or conflict between faculty/students and other Wikipedians. * Courses where the faculty have become nonresponsive. * Courses where the structure of the course is inappropriate or students are unaware of important policies. * A participating student's article has been deleted or nominated for deletion. * A participating student, faculty member, or ambassador has been blocked. * Any other issue with a user who appears to be a student editing as an assignment. ----
It needs your posts to become useful and survive! If you've encountered an education-related incident recently, please post about it, even if it's not urgent. Thank you!
I'm going to post about this on some other lists too.
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 11:05 PM, Frank Schulenburg fschulenburg@wikimedia.org wrote:
Agreed. I think it's a great idea to have a kind of "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester. Did you know that Pharos started an 'Educational peer review' process recently?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Educational_peer_review_requests
I really like the idea and it could be a significant improvement when it comes to giving the students feedback. I would be more than happy if this kind of initiative was successful.
Thanks a lot for your thoughts, Derrick!
Frank
You can now also find a bit more about the 'Educational peer review' concept here (your participation would be very welcome!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Academical_Village#Educat...
Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)
Am 16.04.2012 um 19:27 schrieb Derrick Coetzee:
My thoughts:
Even with the very best student groups I've seen, it was absolutely necessary to review their work periodically. These days I use my Followed users tools to facilitate this.
http://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
I absolutely agree that it should be *mandatory* to have an experienced Wikipedian review each contribution before it goes live in mainspace, or else you can end up with a lot of people panicking to clean up contributions that were not ready for deployment. This is feasible because of the program requirement that there are a limited number of students per CA/OA, and contributes directly to student learning and to the project.
Moreover, I think it's very important to have at least one less thorough "checkpoint" review earlier in the semester, where the student's initial draft is reviewed for any problems. Students are deploying very late in the term, and if they have serious issues such as copyright violations it may be too late to do much about them.
Finally, I think it's vital that ambassadors examine the topic choices of the students as soon as they're made, and make sure they're suitable for articles.
I don't believe Sonia's experience with her class is representative (that particular faculty member has a history of issues), but I do think that certain measures are good for every student int he program.
-- Derrick Coetzee User:Dcoetzee
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Sonia Newton-Shostakovich though.poppies.blow@gmail.com wrote:
Seconding Guerillero, with a little added thought:
Some, okay, a lot of the edits students have made have been frankly terrible. Many classes do not have ambassadors actively supervising them, and are putting out edits that are more harmful than helpful to the project and don't get fixed (and personally, I've been involved with a class just as "on call for questions"; just reviewed their work recently and was kicking myself for not having the foresight to monitor them regardless of my explicit role. Yay cleanup!) We don't have enough active ambassadors to follow each student around, nor is there infrastructure in place to make sure each class has some oversight of that sort.
It's a dual-fold problem: firstly, as an Articles for Creation reviewer, I'm sometimes coming across students who are obviously part of classes but who have not made any edits which would allow me to find their course page, and whose instructions have clearly been dismal; secondly, as an ambassador, I'm sometimes overwhelmed when looking at just a couple of courses and trying to make a student's contributions conform to our standards without destroying their morale and/or grade. A lot of this could be prevented on the campus side of things: before the in-hindsight cleaning up, instructions for students should be sufficient and accurate, and supervision by experienced Wikipedians made compulsory. Too many terrible paragraphs will fall through the gaps otherwise.
The more work I see from this project the more I'm inclined to agree with Piotr that profs who haven't ever done tasks similar to that they set for their students should not be setting those tasks.
Sonia
On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Guerillero Wikipedia guerillero.wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(b) We need to shoot for upper level classes. PSY 100 or ENG 101 should not be our target class. The students do not know yet how to write effectively in their subject area, for the most part, and have yet to do real research. 200 or 300 level classes would be easier to work with.
These two things cut down on the number of volunteers. Who wants to work with 100 freshman who do not comunicate with you no matter how hard you try and who have yet to learn how to produce a workable product.
--Guerillero
On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Everton Zanella Alvarenga ezalvarenga@wikimedia.org wrote:
Interesting thread!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Ambassadors#The_future_of_our_pr...
This is the main challenge in my opinion for the second semester for WEP in Brazil, multiply the number of ambassadors - there is some progress here in the pilot. To convince professors on the importance and need of this program after showing successful cases seems easier than to have enough campus ambassadors for the demand. A key step of the project when we are thinking about expanding in any place.
Tom
-- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Wikimedia Brasil Wikimedia Foundation
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Education mailing list Education@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/education
Guerillero,
That is the issue world wide. Here are some of the issues that I see.
Which countries and which issue exactly are you referring to?
(a) We need to have the guts to say no sometimes. At least in the states, I feel that we would get better results if we tried to get more small liberal arts schools who have class sizes that range from 10-30. One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model.
(1) Which numbers are you referring to when you're saying "One hundred plus person classes do not work well with our model"? If I remember it well, we didn't have that many classes with more than a hundred students in the past. I doubt that we can make a statement based on a statistically significant basis yet.
(2) Isn't it more a question of the ratio between Ambassador and students, i.e. how many students does one Ambassador have to support?
Frank