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How Students Are Learning Medicine and Collaborative Skills, And Transforming Wikipedia
By John Kleefeld In my last blog post, I wrote about the wide range of disciplines represented in student Wikipedia projects. Perhaps the most ambitious effort is the Wiki Project Med Foundation, whose goal is nothing less than “to provide the sum of all medical knowledge to all people in their own language.” Started by Wikipedia enthusiast and UBC clinical professor James Heilman, the foundation is working to this goal by collaborating with various partners. These include the closely allied WikiProject Medicine, the non-profit organization Translators Without Borders, and University of California San Francisco, where fourth-year medical students have been editing Wikipedia for credit in a month-long elective course since 2013. Amin Azzam, associate clinical…
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The Wikipedia Manifesto
By John Kleefeld This post has been updated to correct some initial errors. A spectre is haunting academia—the spectre of Wikipedia. And while there was a time when all the old powers would have entered into an alliance to exorcise this spectre, a worldwide community of educators is now taking a radically different approach: they’re assigning students the task of editing and writing Wikipedia’s sprawling content, and giving them academic credit for doing so. In the process, they’re turning students from indiscriminate knowledge consumers to savvy knowledge creators. At the same time, they’re building an open-access and up-to-date storehouse of knowledge that, in certain areas, already rivals traditional reference works.…
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Faculty Fellows Playing Key Roles at GMCTL
[social_share/] [social-bio] The Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning (GMCTL) has, for the past 3 academic years, had GMCTL Faculty Fellows. These roles are filled by members of faculty who set aside up to 1/2 day of their time per week to contribute to teaching and learning related work with and through the GMCTL. The Centre and the university benefits hugely from the contribution of these fantastic Fellows whose contribution is planned to align with their particular expertise and experience as well as university priorities. Their work also assists in keeping the GMCTL services informed by and in alignment with the needs and interests of those we serve. Below…
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Teaching Students About Research: Open Data = Quality Data with Easy Access
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler When we teach students research skills and ways of approaching being a researcher, we know that research is more than just plugging in numbers or following a script. In a statistical analysis, being able to select the variables to use (and not use) and the analysis to answer the question is as important as running the analysis. We want students to design their own questions and analysis. The challenge though is where to get appropriate data easily and ethically? At the U of S, we are in luck! Our librarians have identified several key Open Data sources: Canadian Open Government Data http://libguides.usask.ca/c.php?g=16466&p=91079 Site…