On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 1:25 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.ayers(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=15031&PRODUCT_CODE=ELI082/S…
> "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