[Air-L] assigning students their college/university wikipedia page
Cristina Lopez
clopez at umn.edu
Tue Nov 11 08:02:34 PST 2008
I have provided consultations for faculty on wikis and Wikipedia, and
have learned also that students sometimes have difficulty writing for
wikis. Most of us are socialized to write as individuals and usually are
evaluated as individuals and those habits are hard to break. One
instructor I worked with noted that his students tended to write in an
additive fashion when they created a wiki web that was meant to provide
their own guide to the University. When I've worked with colleagues on
documents housed in a wiki and invited them to add material and edit
pages, some of them added material at the end of the document instead of
diving in and making changes throughout! (It's always worth reminding
people about the version feature in wikis.)
I think it's also worth considering how to evaluate student
contributions to Wikipedia. One advantage of wikis is that you can
review the history to see who contributed what when. However, if they're
altering, tweaking, improving, I wonder how you might evaluate smaller
changes. Also, would they have to create an account in order to edit?
Would you create an account for the class, or would you ask them to
create individual accounts? If so, you'd need their account information,
I would think.
With regard to students not feeling ready to be knowledge producers, I
can see that. I think one of the beauties of Wikipedia and wikis is that
you can look at the discussions and history to see
knowledge-in-the-making. People might not take the time to do that, or
might be unaware of those features.
Finally, I think it's good to think about genres of writing, in this
case, the genre "encyclopedia." I have found this useful for a couple of
reasons. First, whenever I teach workshops on wikis there is the
inevitable vehement response from instructors who don't see it as a
credible source of information. At that point someone--sometimes me,
sometimes a workshop participant--will point out that like any other
encyclopedia, Wikipedia should be treated as a starting point, perhaps a
way to get an overview of the topic before looking into more substantial
resources. Not everyone buys that argument, by the way, but it usually
leads to a very interesting discussion about knowledge production and
how to evaluate the credibility of different types of writing. (And
fwiw, I think it'd be interesting to learn from your students what other
faculty have said about Wikipedia.)
With regard to addressing students' fear of producing knowledge, I think
talking about genres can alleviate some of their uncertainty by making
visible the rules and conventions.
Cris
Cristina Lopez, Ph.D.
Office of Information Technology, Digital Media Center
University of Minnesota
212 Walter Library
117 Pleasant St. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-626-6639
Please visit our Web site: http://dmc.umn.edu
Darren Purcell wrote:
> Gordon,
>
> Thanks for the reply. I never thought much of a difference between a 15-20
> page paper and a Wikipedia entry if it was tightly defined. Still, I have
> used these as a way to show how they can possibly contribute to knowledge. I
> also offer this as group work as well so the work is spread out.
>
> We really need to remove the grand facade from Wikipedia ala the exposure of
> the the Wizard of Oz as a real human with frailties and weaknesses.
>
> Darren
>
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 5:45 PM, Gordon Carlson <gordycarlson at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>
>> Hi Dan,
>> I saw your email and wanted to quickly respond to you. I know those looks
>> you are talking about (and I have displayed them myself). I think the
>> reason that students don't like to take on Wikipedia entry tasks is less
>> their self perceived role as knowledge creator and more than it seems hard.
>> It sounds like a lot of work to many people. Wikipedia is still seen as an
>> encyclopedia by many and those are magical books that strange geniuses work
>> hard to make (as most are commercial). Creating an entry in what seems, to
>> many students, to be a polished and published work seems hard.
>>
>> Whether true or not, I think it would be the same as asking your students
>> to write a book or a journal article. They see it as above and beyond
>> writing a paper.
>>
>> For good or bad, Wikipedia still seems hard to do.
>>
>> My two cents. Thanks for reading,
>>
>> Gordon
>> University of Illinois, Chicago
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Darren Purcell <dpurcell at ou.edu> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> I have offered the assignment to students in my Political Geography course
>>> over the last 2 years. To date I have had only one person out of 130
>>> students do it. He took on a controversial topic and found himself
>>> defending
>>> his work as it was being changed and edited a great deal.
>>>
>>> My theory as to why more students did not take it on is that they don't
>>> see
>>> themselves as producers of knowledge yet. I can not confirm this, nor
>>> have
>>> I asked why they do not. I just see looks of horror on their faces at the
>>> suggestion .
>>>
>>> Darren Purcell
>>>
>>> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 3:39 PM, Jankowski <nickjan at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> David:
>>>>
>>>> On the Vanderbilt Univ site is an audio interview with history professor
>>>> Michael Bess who used the WP Discussion Page of a Wikipedia article
>>>>
>>> ("Atomic
>>>
>>>> Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki") as some of the source material for
>>>>
>>> a
>>>
>>>> course on historical methods. See:
>>>> http://blogs.vanderbilt.edu/cftpodcast/?paged=2
>>>> http://www.vanderbilt.edu/historydept/michaelbess/Hist%20200
>>>>
>>>> Nick Jankowski
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> At 22:19 10-11-2008, you wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I would also like to hear about people's experiences with assigning
>>>>
>>>>> projects that involve creating/editing WP content.
>>>>>
>>>>> To that end, there is a WP page dedicated to its use in school
>>>>>
>>> projects:
>>>
>>>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects
>>>>>
>>>>> -mz
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Michael Zimmer, PhD
>>>>> Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
>>>>> Associate, Center for Information Policy Research
>>>>> University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
>>>>> e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
>>>>> w: www.michaelzimmer.org
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Nov 10, 2008, at 2:44 PM, David M Silver wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> aoir people,
>>>>>
>>>>>> has anyone had any experience with assigning students the task of
>>>>>> altering, improving, and tweaking their university page on
>>>>>> wikipedia? in
>>>>>> other words, has anyone assigned their college/university wikipedia
>>>>>> page
>>>>>> as a site of construction for a class? if so, i'm curious to hear any
>>>>>> anecdotes, experiences, best-practices, relevant readings, and
>>>>>> anything
>>>>>> else you wish to share.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> david silver
>>>>>> http://silverinsf.blogspot.com
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>>>
>>> --
>>> Darren Purcell
>>> SWAAG Treasurer
>>> Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Advisor
>>> Dept. of Geography
>>> University of Oklahoma
>>>
>>> Email: dpurcell at ou.edu
>>> (405) 325-9193
>>> http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/P/Darren.E.Purcell-1/
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>
>>
>> --
>> Gordon Carlson
>> C: 541-990-1155
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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