On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Cormac Lawler cormaggio@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:25 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.ayers@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=15031&PRODUCT_CODE=ELI082/SE...
"To enhance the learning experience of a term paper, students were required to publish their papers in Wikipedia. Publishing for a large audience provided authentic feedback and encouraged students to do their best work. Using Wikipedia also allowed students to connect with a vibrant community and share their knowledge by making their papers publicly accessible."
I haven't watched the profession, but the sentence "students were required to publish their papers in Wikipedia" makes me cringe. One can only hope the professors introduced them to (or understood) the norms and policies of the site, and didn't require original research...
Yes, there are clear differences in methodology between a term paper and a Wikipedia article (completely aside from wiki versus non-wiki), as well as in genre of writing style, which is certainly non-trivial. But I still admire people who are taking the initiative in this regard - even if they are making mistakes (provided they/we learn from those mistakes!). There is an interesting ongoing writeup by an educator in the University of British Colombia about his experiences of a similar project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness
Cormac
I just discovered Jbmurray's project the other day, and was going to post to this list about it as well! It's fantastic. He went through and had his upper-level students bring a bunch of stubs about Latin American literature up to GA/FA status.
That seems like a particularly good project, because you are a) making people who have something of a background in the field do the research; and b) if you start with a stub chances are better that the topic is notable, won't get deleted, etc.; c) you end up with FAs -- win all around.
Anyway, I think he is interested in feedback and talking more about his project/similar projects.
Also, I've been talking to Jay Walsh at the Foundation -- he fields requests from professors occasionally who are interested in learning more about teaching wikipedia or using it in their classroom. I know there's already a project on en:wp, but it seems like it would be useful to try to put together a more polished packet of materials to hand out to professors who want to use Wikipedia for their assignments, especially when there isn't a volunteer free to work with them one-on-one.
-- phoebe