Mark A. Sarvary is a senior lecturer in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is the director of the Investigative Biology Teaching Laboratories. You can read his blogs at www.investigativebiology.cornell.edu and follow him @cornellbiolabs. When you ask students: “When was the last time you walked into a library to … Continued
Dr. Joel Parker is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at SUNY Plattsburgh, where he has incorporated Wikipedia into his Cell Biology courses. In November we featured some of the great work his students did in our Cell Service roundup. In this post, he explains how assigning students to contribute to Wikipedia brings them through the … Continued
Subhashish Panigrahi (@subhapa) is an India-based educator, author, blogger, Wikimedian, language activist and free knowledge evangelist, currently at the Centre for Internet and Society‘s Access To Knowledge program. In this guest post, he covers some guidelines about copyright that will be useful to students and educators working on Wikipedia assignments. Copyright is a really complicated topic, and when … Continued
Dr. Debby Walser-Kuntz taught with Wikipedia in her immunobiology course at Carleton College. Rachel Cheung and Dana Paine were students in that class. In this collaborative post, they describe the experience, identifying benefits to their research and science communications skills. When I was deciding whether or not to incorporate a Wikipedia writing project into my … Continued
Dr. Chelse Prather assigned students to write Wikipedia articles as part of her “Insects and Society” course at Radford University. In this post, she discusses the design of that course, and the benefits it brought to her students. Insects affect human daily life in both positive and negative ways. Most humans are not conscious of … Continued
Dr. Elizabeth De Wolfe is a Professor of History at the University of New England. Her “Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies” course assigned students to expand women-focused content on Wikipedia. As historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has famously stated, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” And in addition to history, women — the well-behaved and otherwise … Continued
Timothy Henningsen is an Assistant Professor of English at the College of DuPage. He’s run Wikipedia assignments in about a dozen courses, and has talked about the experience elsewhere. In this post, “The Slow, Necessary Death of the Research Paper (And How Wikipedia Can Revive Composition Instruction)” he discusses the benefit of Wikipedia writing assignments compared … Continued
Ariella Rotramel’s Feminist Theory course was composed of 16 undergraduates at Connecticut College. They critiqued Wikipedia through a feminist lens to find gaps in available knowledge. The students then connected theory to practice, by researching and writing about missing topics. Our Wikipedia assignment was designed to help students gain metaliteracy skills, such as critical thinking … Continued
Monika Sengul-Jones is a Doctoral Candidate in Communication & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a Visiting Graduate Researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle. She has been researching and developing projects focused on the analysis of gender-related content gaps on Wikipedia. Recently, she created a set of learnings for feminism … Continued
