On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 8:50 AM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
The argument that class
assignments will prove the soft underbelly of academia depends on some
things we can know about (assessment methods, for example - pretty much
ruling it out here in the UK), and some we don't (whether more intimate
contact with WP mechanisms will enthuse academic experts or put them off).
Obviously catering for evaluation makes sense. But I suspect the key
issue is going to turn out to be this: do 20 hours working on a WP
assignment teach a student more than 20 hours working on something more
conventional? If WP work turns out to be educational, then academics
ought to support it. I think there are reasons to be positive about this
point.
And as usual, El Reg's coverage manages to be negative anyway. They
are truly a lesson to all of us. From
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/01/wikipedia_makes_students_do_better_…
:
This is achieved, however, not by the kids finding
stuff out on the notoriously unreliable site, but rather by getting them to write material
for it. Fear of criticism by the obsessive Wiki-fiddler community apparently motivates
youngsters far more than the worry that their academic supervisors might catch them out in
an error....
Normally in cases of Wikipedia's effects on
academia - or indeed other fields of endeavour such as journalism, politics etc - the
story is one of lazy students, hacks, speechwriters etc clipping stuff from the site
without checking it or even disguising it before claiming it as their own work. Today we
hear of a new way to exploit the unpaid Wikipedian: lazy college professors can use the
crowdsourced encyclo-custodians to mark their students' work, again without any
guarantee that they will do so properly or accurately.
--
gwern
http://www.gwern.net