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WikiProjects, Article Importance, and Article Quality: An Intimate Relationship (1/2)
By John Kleefeld [social-bio] In a previous post, I wrote about how WikiProject Medicine acts as a forum for determining the priority (also called importance) of specific health-related Wikipedia articles and assessing their quality (also called class). More generally, these three concepts—WikiProjects, article importance, and article quality—are crucial for instructors and students to understand if they seek to use course-based assignments to improve Wikipedia. I will address each of them in turn. WikiProjects A WikiProject comprises a group of collaborators who aim to achieve specific Wikipedia editing goals, or to achieve goals in a specific subject or discipline represented in Wikipedia. An example of an editing type of project is…
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Wikipedia’s Gender Bias – and What Your Students Can Do About It
By John Kleefeld [social-bio] Every system has its biases, and Wikipedia is no exception. A common criticism of Wikipedia is its male bias. Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, agreed with the criticism after it conducted a 2011 survey indicating that up to 90% of editors identified as male. This is a problem for a non-profit organization whose mission is “to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content … and to disseminate it effectively and globally.” The mechanisms for the gender bias are various, complex, and the subject of several studies, recently summarized by two New York researchers. They may include the code-heavy interface, called…
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Teaching the Language of our Disciplines
[social_share/] [social-bio] By Carolyn Hoessler Bolded words (those terms highlighted in textbooks), matter for they are the building blocks of every language that allow us to communicate complex ideas, convey how we see the world and shape our questions and ways of engaging with the world to answer our questions. But words, those collected sets of sounds, do not form a language. The relationships (syntax) and the underlying meetings & ideas (semantics) are necessary for fluency. We see this in students’ work where the keywords are there, but applied incorrectly or are erratically irrelevant. They may start a sentence with one theorists premise and end it with another’s conclusion…
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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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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…
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Hands up! How We Increase (Or Decrease) Student Participation
[social_share/] [social-bio] We design courses with many opportunities for students to learn by completing assignments, readings and answering questions in class. But does our teaching increase such behaviours or decrease them? One lens, psychology of learning, suggests we likely do both. B. F. Skinners’ operant conditioning suggests that how we respond to student behavior can either increase (reinforce) or decrease (punish) our students actions including participating in class discussion or completing homework. What is Operant conditioning? As Thorndike’s Law of Effect and B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning note we are influenced by the consequences of our actions. Good consequences encourage more of this activity, while unpleasant (or unhelpful) consequences encourage less…
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Tools and Strategies for “Hot Topics”- Part 3 of 3
By Tereigh Ewert After the difficult conversation or incident in class I regularly use formative feed-back in my class—feedback that is solicited over the course of a term, allowing me to measure student progress, highlighting concepts that are still unclear, and to hear from the students about what is and is not creating an effective learning environment. The formative feedback tool below is new to me, and will be very helpful in determining if and how the difficult topics are addressed in class were ultimately beneficial, or that they require follow-up. The Critical Incident Questionnaire At the end of the day (or week, or unit, or other appropriate time period),…
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Tools and Strategies for ‘Hot Topics’ – Part 2 of 3
By Tereigh Ewert During Class A favorite strategy of mine has long been the “oops” and “ouch” strategy. I’m fairly certain I encountered it at a conference, but an Internet search doesn’t reveal who first developed the strategy. In English slang, the word “ouch” means “that hurt me.” The word “oops” means, “I made a mistake” (I like to define these terms in class, in case they are not familiar to some students). In the “The Oops and Ouch” strategy, students can express themselves in two ways. If they feel uncomfortable with something that has been said in a class or a conversation, saying “ouch” alerts their peer(s) (or instructor)…
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Tools and Strategies for ‘Hot Topics’ – Part 1 of 3
By Tereigh Ewert Before Class Regardless of the discipline in which you teach, undoubtedly you have encountered comments or topics in your classroom that have been opinion-/value- and/or emotion-laden. In those moments perhaps your heart quickened and you felt panicked trying to decide what to do. In this three-part series, we’re going to explore some possible tools and strategies for managing “hot topics” in the classroom. Whether you have planned to address or discuss a controversial topic in your class, or whether you just know from experience that incendiary comments can emerge with seemingly no provocation, the one advantage you have is that you have time to plan ahead. Imagine…