I have yet to listen to the MP3 file, but Random Access Mazar had an interesting post today about a presentation given for TechKnowFile. Her co-presenter, Derek Williams, a History professor at UTM, has an amazing assignment he gives his history students. They are told to fix Wikipedia pages dealing with their topics.
This year my co-teacher and I offered an extra credit assignment to fix a problem on a Wikipedia page dealing with their topics. Only two of 16 took the assignment, but those two made significant improvements. My goal with the assignment was for them to see how easy it is for anyone to edit a wiki, as well as to see that there are flaws in some of the information. Mostly, I wanted their worldview to include the idea that it is really really easy for anyone to edit a wiki, particularly Wikipedia.
It’s one thing to offer a non-required assignment to fix an error; it’s an entirely different thing to have a goal of the course be to make significant improvement. If my assignment shows students how easy it is to change a wiki, Williams’ assignment teachesthis. I wonder if, instead of an annotated bibliography, students could claim a Wikipedia stub and flesh it out into a full article, with citations, instead. It might not be for everyone, but it’d certainly be educational on a number of levels. It’d also give the student a real-world product and a sense of having really contributed something.
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