“Pseudotransactionality is the practice of having students pretend to write a letter to an employer, a newspaper article, or even a tweet” to situate their learning in ‘real-life’ contexts, writes Dr. Kathleen Sheppard, an instructor in our program. “It’s a real process, but with an artificial end. Students know this, so they tend not to work … Continued
Did you know that for some people in Chicago, the term “Windy City” doesn’t apply to the miles per hour of the weather but to the constant changing of political winds within the region? Until my trip there last weekend, neither did I, and in the last month over 12,000 people have also learned about this nickname … Continued
Anne Leonard is an Information Literacy Librarian at New York City College of Technology. In this post she reflects on her experience incorporating Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons into her course, Learning Places: Understanding the City. Interdisciplinary learning and place-based learning are at the heart of General Education at City Tech. For the past several semesters, … Continued
In May, Outreach Manager Samantha Weald and I visited Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge to participate in the CxC (Communication across the Curriculum) Summer Institute, a faculty workshop that introduces attendees to hands-on assignment design for their classrooms. Wiki Education has worked with CxC faculty at LSU for several years to bring high-quality Wikipedia … Continued
As we move into the last weeks of the Spring term, Fall 2016 may seem a distant memory, but for Wiki Education it was a critical term as we learn how to support a rapidly growing number of courses. It also marked the conclusion of the Wikipedia Year of Science, which we launched in January … Continued
David Webster is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Bishop’s University. In this post he explains how his students contributed to Wikipedia’s coverage of truth commissions in his Winter 2016 class on Memory, Truth and Reconciliation. The above image is a printed version of their work, which will be read by future students. … Continued
While visiting the Linguistic Society of America Conference in Austin earlier this month, I asked attendees: why do you think the study of linguistics is so relevant today? Their replies were varied: the election, the rise of fake news, the importance of understanding language bias, and knowing how we use rhetoric to persuade others. In … Continued
Unicellular organisms take the bare minimum to be considered complete. In that sense, they’re kind of the opposite of Wikipedia articles. It’s surprising that the Wikipedia article on unicellular organisms languished for so long. Once just a stub with a list of links, the article was transformed by a student in Joel Parker’s Cell Biology … Continued
Wikipedia has nearly 8,000 pharmacology articles, and these are accessed 40 million times per month. In the US alone, Wikipedia’s health-related searches outnumber those leading to websites such as the NIH, WebMD, and Mayo Clinic. While information on health information can always be improved, we’re intrigued by Dr. Ye Li’s course at the University of … Continued
