I'm a librarian at a college, wikipedia is always featured in our Info Literacy teaching sessions and the discussion is often on how the teacher allows them to use it. The MMM page link is on the way to english teachers right now and I will see how to add a link to a tutorial I've done on it.
http://library.disted.camosun.bc.../ wikipedia2.swf

Very interesting work, thank you for writing it.
Richard
Richard | Homepage | 18 Mar, 2008 - 3:41 pm | #

Richard, thanks for this. I like the idea behind your tuturial, though I might suggest a few different details. Still, it looks very worthwhile.
Jon | Homepage | 18 Mar, 2008 - 6:31 pm | #

Jon - very interesting. I gather from the course code it is at the third year level? Was it a seminar (under 35 students) or a lecture course? Compared with traditional forms of evaluation - marking essays, exams, etc - did you find it more time consuming on your part, less or about the same?
Craig | Homepage | 18 Mar, 2008 - 9:23 pm | #

Yeah, it's in fact a mix: third years, fourth years, a few second years. There are 33 of them.

And I've put an extraordinary amount of time into it. I guess I shouldn't, but 1) I've been a little scared it would go wrong, and have been pretty interventionist to make sure it went right; 2) I feared they'd all fail.

I'm going to try and get funds for a TA if I do something similar next year (and I hope to do so).

The good thing is that, having scrapped the final paper, there should be less to do once term is over.

Meanwhile, today, as it happens, there was an little spat of an edit war... But it happened among others, while I and the students were in class, ironically discussing the very book that the article they were warring over covers.
Jon | Homepage | 18 Mar, 2008 - 9:52 pm | #

I'm pretty blown away by the quality of the Senor Presidente page (haven't had a chance to look at the others yet). Comparing it to what you get from that deathly dull and generally vacuous genre, the traditional literary history (Cambridge etc.), this is a wonderful resource.
Ale | 19 Mar, 2008 - 10:53 am | #

The kids are doing pretty well, eh? And they're working on it all the time.
Jon | Homepage | 19 Mar, 2008 - 2:57 pm | #

Jon,

Your write-up narrates the process beautifully, and is invalauble resource/example for other academics that may be mildly considering such a radical project. So thanks.

I often think of the struggle over what is and isn't an argument pretty fascinating in Wikipedia, and I wonder how much of this surfaced in the articles you all have been working on. Have their been struggles over facts and interpretations for these texts? And if so, by extension, might that start to bring in some of the critical notions of argumentation that may seem at first external to such a project for the students?

The idea of a public/socail peer-reviewed project makes this idea of a class working together, highlighting that we you speak of, sop much more powerful. Not only is there a definable goal, but a larger relationship to ideas, the creation of knowledge, and changing nature of relevance and interpretation over time.

I really can;t say enough great things about the work you've done, and the push towards an open framework for sharing research, working through ideas, and collaboratively creating knowledge as a focused exercise in thinking with others together is phenomenal.

You rule the Web 2.0 school.
Jim | Homepage | 20 Mar, 2008 - 1:06 pm | #

I like Wikipedia and often find it better than other encyclopedias. My colleagues say that is because I am trained to judge, but students aren't yet and can't be trusted with it. I say, they read all sorts of stuff all the time, they listen to talk radio, why should this be off limits?

I don't let people cite *any* encyclopedias as ultimate sources of truth, so the university's specific prohibition against citing Wikipedia in theses and dissertations doesn't affect me or my students. Encyclopedias are, however, great first reference sources. That includes Wikipedia, I have found.
Professor Zero | Homepage | 30 Mar, 2008 - 8:42 pm | #

I appreciate your comment at IHE and especially your Wiki essay. I, as I keep saying, am not a proponent of encyclopedias of any sort as a deep research tool, but I am a true believer in the value of communal cognition and collective intelligence and I am especially a true believer in helping students understand the best ways to use the tools of their time to their disadvantage. Having never been in a doctoral level class where we did not look something up in Wikipedia - if only to find what else to look for - I still wonder why anyone would ban it.

Your course description is wonderful, this is a link I will be emailing to many people.
Ira Socol | Homepage | 02 Apr, 2008 - 4:30 am | #