Wikipedia in the Classroom: Early Adopters
So much for being original…
Inside Higher Ed published a news piece today on Wikipedia in the classroom titled “When Wikipedia Is the Assignment.” In case you haven’t seen them, I wrote Simple English Wikipedia for ESL/EFL Students Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 for students studying on their own and Add Some Spice to Writing Class With Simple English Wikipedia for teachers because I hadn’t seen anyone advocating students writing for Simple English Wikipedia.
Today, along comes an Inside Higher Ed article is about a presentation at the Educase conference, which ended last Friday (October 26th, 2007). The University of Washington professor Martha Groom a year ago started having her students write articles for Wikipedia in two of her university classes.
Groom and her co-presenter Andreas Brockhaus identified many of the same problems with regular writing assignments and the same advantages with Wikipedia writing assignments as I did in my post for teachers. Namely, writing for Wikipedia is more meaningful.
The Power Point of the presentation (available at the bottom of the Inside Higher Ed article) is an excellent resource for teachers thinking about having their students write for Wikipedia. It lists some of the problems the professor encountered, some of her solutions, what worked well, and the final outcomes of the assignment.
One of the big differences between the situation of Martha Groom’s class and of an ESL or EFL class is that the English class would write for Simple English Wikipedia rather than the regular Wikipedia. The Simple English Wikipedia community is much smaller so the editing and discussion is at a much lower level. Because of this, the “Publishing Issues” identified by Groom (articles being deleted, merged, rude comments) are much less likely to be a problem.
Groom and Brockhaus also point out a resource that I missed when listed resources in part 4 of my series of posts: the Wikipedia Tutorial. Although, this tutorial is from the main Wikipedia site, it isn’t too difficult and may be suitable for ESL/EFL students. It gives students a chance to practice using the tools and learning the rules before getting down to writing.
Among the comments on the article are a number of professors who have tried similar things in their classrooms and some other problems you may encounter using Wikipedia in the classroom. There is also a comment from a representative of the new expert-written online encyclopedia Citizendium suggesting a new project called Eduzendium as a project designed specifically for student writing. Eduzendium appears to be for university students so it may or may not be worth looking into depending on your situation.