Our favorite (and also busiest!) time of the fall term has rolled around again. During these last few weeks before the holidays, students move all their final edits live, resulting in thousands of words added to Wikipedia overnight! It’s fascinating to see the breadth and depth of interesting new content that suddenly appears.
As instructors begin looking through their students’ contributions to grade, some share what their students accomplished by posting Twitter threads like this one by Dr. Margaret Galvan. We love to see the excitement that these threads generate in our Twitter community and hope it encourages other instructors to join our movement!
“I am so proud of my University of Florida students and their public work on comics creating podcasts about contemporary graphic novels and improving Wikipedia pages for underrepresented queer cartoonists,” Dr. Galvan’s thread reads.
“Together, these podcasts and Wikipedia entries on comics showcase the vast array of comics and their applicability to classrooms. Students respond to these works and learn new ways of reading. … These projects contain an impressive depth of research that I don’t often see on more traditional assignments. With public-facing work, students feel like there are stakes and an audience.”
Dr. Galvan also had kind words to say about our Wikipedia Student Program staff, who provided resources and support to her class along the way.
“These projects received support from fabulous folks like Helaine and Shalor of Wiki Education and our amazing UF librarians Laurie Taylor and Hélène Huet.”
Dr. Galvan tagged quite a few cartoonists in the thread whose biographies students had created or improved. Some of the cartoonists even chimed in with more information and resources that students could include in their biographies.
We love to see instructors celebrating student work. And it’s even cooler to see folks in our program interacting with the people whose Wikipedia biographies they’ve helped produce!
For some other great tweets celebrating student work on Wikipedia, check out Dr. Marina Adshade’s thread about biographies of women economists; Dr. Jen Glass’ thread about great work from her environmental science students; this thread by Dr. Kate Sheppard about her history of science course; and this one by Dr. Kate Grillo about her archaeology students.
Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia writing assignment into an upcoming course? Our free resources and student trainings help you do it. Read more or get started by visiting teach.wikiedu.org.
