Earlier this month, I hosted a “Teaching with Wikipedia” workshop at Hunter College alongside Chanitra Bishop. Twenty one instructors from across greater New York learned about our Classroom Program and Year of Science.
After showing off our Dashboard, the conversation shifted to details about running the assignment. Instructors wanted to know more about the six-week timeline, and wondered if the assignment might take up too much course time.
So, we walked them through a typical syllabus. Wikipedia assignments involve many small, weekly assignments that complement regular course work. These assignments can be as simple as creating a username on Wikipedia, for example — the task for week one. Once the assignment timeline was clear, instructors relaxed about the potential for integrating it.
If you’re an instructor, or know one who might be interested in a Wikipedia assignment, let us know. I’d love to help you get started!
We have some upcoming campus visits:
- Temple University, February 15, 3 – 5 p.m., Paley Library Lecture Hall, 1210 Polett Walk, Ground Floor.
- Bryn Mawr College, February 16, 4:30 – 6 p.m. Location TBD. Registration required.
- California State University, East Bay, February 19, 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., LI3079, Upper Mall level of the CSU East Bay Library, from 10 a.m. to noon (map). Register here. (more).
- University of California, Davis, March 2, 10 a.m. – 12 p.m., Life Sciences building, room 1022 (map). Registration required (here), follow Wiki Ed for more details. Supported by the UC Davis Biotech program.
Samantha Erickson
Outreach Manager
Photo: “Samantha Erickson, Hunter College, NYC, 12 January 2016” by Aramtak – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
I think part of the answer is for Wikimedia to host online journals that will permit short articles that are focused at a certain level. This level-specific focusing is especially important in STEM topics because the content is either irrelevant or incomprehensible to those not at the level. A proof of the quadratic equation is only useful for about 3 years of a young mathematicians career. In contrast, a sonnet from Romeo and Juliet is relevant from puberty to senility.
There are currently only two active online Wikimedia journals. Mine is [[Wikiversity: Second Journal of Science]] if linked to from Wikipedia (just [[Second Journal of Science]] from Wikiversity).
There are currently 10,000 open access journals on the internet. I don’t know how many of them have an educational focus, but any educational open access journal should be on Wikimedia because of the sister-linking to Wikipedia. I do physics, where definitions matter. The obsession with definitions intrudes into my prose, and being able to link a word while I write allows me to tell the reader exactly what I mean. To quote Humpty Dumpty,
‘ ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ‘
Please think about the idea of online journals for Wikimedia. It only takes a few hours to set one up on Wikiversity.