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@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@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@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@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 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers
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-- Darren Purcell SWAAG Treasurer Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Advisor Dept. of Geography University of Oklahoma
Email: dpurcell@ou.edu (405) 325-9193 http://faculty-staff.ou.edu/P/Darren.E.Purcell-1/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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