{"id":1888,"date":"2012-01-10T10:59:47","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T18:59:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=1888"},"modified":"2012-01-10T10:59:47","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T18:59:47","slug":"wikipedia-being-used-as-a-university-teaching-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2012\/01\/10\/wikipedia-being-used-as-a-university-teaching-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia being used as a university teaching tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDMONTON (CUP) – A handful of University of Alberta classes have introduced Wikipedia to their classrooms as a teaching resource this past semester, despite criticisms about the website\u2019s credibility in educational institutions.<\/p>\n

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Wikipedia is increasingly being used as a tool for teachers (photo by Carol-Lynne Michaels\/Nexus).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The initiative to integrate Wikipedia into classes began in the United States with the Wikimedia Foundation\u2019s Wikipedia Education Program, but has expanded globally to include classes in Canada and India. Professors use the website by replacing traditional writing or research assignments with students writing Wikipedia articles or improving pre-existing pages.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn addition to getting all the benefits from a traditional research assignment, students are also learning new media literacy skills,\u201d says Jonathan Obar, Wikipedia\u2019s educations coordinator for Canada. \u201cThey\u2019re being exposed to a growing Wiki culture, and they\u2019re being exposed to a very real and very relevant social-media phenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obar is responsible for reaching out to Canadian universities and encouraging schools to use Wikipedia. Originally the program\u2019s goal was to improve the poor quality of many Wikipedia articles on social sciences. Instead of hiring content experts to fix the problem, the idea of giving students the experience to rewrite them was implemented.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe real goal is to promote Wikipedia as a tool for innovative e-pedagogy,\u201d says Obar. \u201cThat\u2019s the main thrust of the initiative at this point. There are other goals that go along with that, like bridging divides between the university community and Wikipedia, and teaching students new media literacy skills.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paula Marentette is one University of Alberta professor who uses Wikipedia for her classes. The cognitive psychology professor listed her class on the program\u2019s Canadian Education portal, but has no affiliation with the program.<\/p>\n

Marentette, who had never used Wikipedia before the start of this term, sees the benefits in the program, but is measured with her praise.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom my perspective, this will make students\u2019 writing more meaningful to them. In a discipline like psychology, students think of an essay as something they write for me, and really that\u2019s very true,\u201d says Marentette. \u201cFew other people will read that work they do in a typical class essay. Here, students were thrilled and scared to hear that other people will read this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until the program is used a few times and students get some expertise in it, Marentette is unsure of its full potential. \u201cI don\u2019t really need another flaming hoop for students. If they\u2019re not benefiting from it, then I don\u2019t need to do it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The Wikimedia Foundation also sees this program as beneficial not just for students, as their contributions can help to inform a global audience. \u201cThere\u2019s this student at Georgetown University that, in the first semester of the public policy initiative about a year and a half ago, completely re-did an article about the democratic party in Egypt,\u201d says Obar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the article was being edited and afterwards, a revolution happened in Egypt. So that student\u2019s article, the term paper that he did for his class, has received more than 100,000 hits since the article was finished.\u201d<\/p>\n

Results like this have swayed professors formerly skeptical of Wikipedia to see its use in the classroom. Marentette, for example, says she\u2019ll use Wikipedia again next term, but she says she plans to evaluate it afterward to determine whether to continue with the initiative.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would not use this in every course I teach forever,\u201d she says, but I think that there\u2019s a place where this works.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDMONTON (CUP) – A handful of University of Alberta classes have introduced Wikipedia to their classrooms as a teaching resource this past semester, despite criticisms about the website\u2019s credibility in educational institutions. The initiative to integrate Wikipedia into classes began in the United States with the Wikimedia Foundation\u2019s Wikipedia Education Program, but has expanded globally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-january-11-2012"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1888"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1891,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1888\/revisions\/1891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}