On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 2:24 PM, James Heilman <jmh649(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. -- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com