4.1 Start Wikipedia project ~2 hrs
Starting a Wikipedia Project with Students
PURPOSE OF THE TASK: This task is the initial step to participating in a collaborative, open-source knowledge-building project which will help you understand and work within the mechanism of Wikipedia, a volunteer-based and crowd-sourced knowledge hub. In addition, by writing/ editing a collaborative article you will learn how to evaluate and improve the informational resources that many people consult every day. You will be consistently working towards contributing to open scholarship and education for all by taking consecutive practice steps all throughout the Modules 2, 3 and 5.
TECHNOLOGY: For this task you will be creating an account with the Wiki Education Dashboard, an educational working space, in which you can first learn how to edit Wikipedia before taking your practice steps and tracking your progress.
BACKGROUND:
In the last 10 years, more and more university educators have integrated Wikipedia work into their academic courses to teach their students a broad range of skills relating to the writing with others for a diverse and interested audience. As the Wikipedia Instructor resource shows in its compilation of case studies, there are numerous reasons to integrate Wikipedia into the classroom, such as the fostering of intellectual explorations and co-construction of knowledge that shows students how involved and sometimes “politically fraught” the writing process can be (Wadewitz, p. 5). If students are not writing or editing articles, they can still become visual contributors who share video or photo material that they created to illustrate specific Wikipedia articles. Students can also practice translating content while checking the information they are working with.
There have been a number of Wiki projects happening on our Lethbridge campus, including Dr. Lisa Lambert’s Politicial Science and Joerdis Weilandt’s EAP courses that invited students to address gender parity on Wikipedia.
INSTRUCTIONS:
STEP 1: Access our FLOf 2019 Wiki Education Dashboard Classroom by hitting the following enrollment link to sign up for your own account and access to our shared working space. You can watch the brief tutorial below if you need some demonstration of the sign-up procedure.
STEP 2: Do the assigned five training modules listed for Week 4 (Wikipedia policies, contributing images and media files, evaluating articles and sources, and plagiarism; either all in one go or spread out over the week, but before SUNDAY, Oct. 27, 2019 at midnight. Watch the tutorial below if you need help navigating the Wikipedia Education Classroom space.
STEP 3: Go into your sandbox and briefly jot down your reflections in 3-5 sentences on your first steps in the Wikipedia Education environment. Look at this brief tutorial to learn how to access your sandbox space. SUNDAY, Oct. 27, 2019 at midnight.
- What are your impressions?
- What did you enjoy?
- Did you face any challenges and if yes, how did you address them?
TEACHING INTENTIONS:
Students need to learn to manoeuvre the ever-changing digital landscape in order to make deliberate use of its potential instead of falling pray to misinformation and data-harvesting. A collaborative Wikipedia assignment tasking students to either write a new or edit an existing article, add multimedia or translate existing resources can be a method to teach your students a number of the skills that are essential in the digital age, such as for instance writing skills, media information literacy, critical thinking and research and collaboration, all while contributing and improving the informational resources that the Wikipedia Encyclopedia compiles. (Wikipedia, 2013)
This form of teaching is known as ‘open pedagogy’ which is to mean “the practice of engaging with students as creators of information rather than simply consumers of it. It’s a form of experiential learning in which students demonstrate understanding through the act of creation. The products of open pedagogy are student created and openly licensed so that they may live outside of the classroom in a way that has an impact on the greater community.” (Reed, n.d.)
