At the University of Memphis, faculty are encouraged to come up with proposals for teaching one credit hour courses to incoming Honors Freshman. Usually about 20 faculty take this up. Last year I developed a course around Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken book. For this coming Fall, I am going to create an offering that will be something like Wikipedia as a Tool for Scholarly Research. I suspect the class will fill very quickly and will provide an opportunity to raise the visibility of this discussion across the campus – hopefully flushing out the naysayers in the process. The course will meet officially for 15 one hour sessions. I envision that the course will include a thorough exploration of Wikipedia, review of networks such as GLAM, create some pages, Wikispaces, conduct edit-a-thons and so forth. Questions – Do you all have any thoughts on this? Know of other folks who have created similar classes/studies? Suggestions for topical foci for the course? Or anything else?

Robert P. Connolly, PhD
Director, C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa
1987 Indian Village Drive, Memphis, Tennessee 38109
901-785-3160, ext. 15

Associate Professor, Anthropology
The University of Memphis 38152
901-678-3331

http://www.memphis.edu/chucalissa/
http://rcnnolly.wordpress.com/

The mission of the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa, a division of the University of Memphis, is to protect and interpret the Chucalissa archaeological site’s cultural and natural environments, and to provide the University Community and the public with exceptional educational, participatory, and research opportunities on the landscape’s past and present Native American and traditional cultures.