By Lewis Page
Posted in Bootnotes, 1st June 2011 10:06 GMT
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/01/wikipedia_makes_students_do_better_…
A Canadian English prof says that the use of Wikipedia, in defiance of
accepted wisdom, makes students produce better work.
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
Canadian prof: Wikipedia makes kids study harder
Wiki-fiddler community apparently motivates youngsters far more than
the worry that their academic supervisors might catch them out in an
error.
Brenna Gray, an instructor at Douglas College in British Columbia,
discovered this by experimenting on "approximately 70" students in her
first-year Canadian literature course. The undergraduates were
assigned the task of creating or updating biographical encyclopaedia
articles on obscure Canadian writers. They were compelled to use
normal academic sources and references (in the context of Eng Lit)
such as scholarly or mainstream-media articles, authors' websites etc.
According to Gray, the students' performance and motivation increased
dramatically once it was revealed that their output would be posted on
Wikipedia.
“They were way more careful about citations and about information
being correct,” she said, presenting her studies at a fuzzy-studies
conference in Canada over the weekend. “The fact that Wikipedia is a
public space where the information that they have researched is going
to be read by other people… that made them take the assignment much
more seriously.”
Gray's remarks were reported in the National Post. It would appear
that her students felt that their work would be much more sternly
marked by Wiki-fiddlers than by Gray herself.
“Suddenly, I’m not the only arbiter of correctness," she said.
"There’s this whole volunteer army of people who will grade their work
for them."
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. ®
--
Barbara Dieu
http://barbaradieu.com
http://beespace.net