Abstract:
Research-based writing remains a cornerstone of students’ development in information literacy skills. The traditional college “research paper” assignment, however, with its lack of clear exigence or audience, is less than ideal for building such skills in a way that transfers readily to information tasks in other domains. Indeed, by imposing formal requirements distant from students’ research practices in everyday life, such assignments can sometimes even encourage the same uncritical or mechanical research habits they are designed to correct.
This presentation will review options for practical research service projects in collaboration with the Wikipedia Education Foundation, which has developed a free online platform to assist students in learning to create, expand or edit Wikipedia articles in a classroom context. Using the WikiEdu platform, students complete online training modules, build skills through a variety of customizable scaffolded assignments, and navigate Wikipedia’s strict research and sourcing standards to produce a high-quality final research product on any of a wide variety of course-related topics.
In researching for Wikipedia, students enter an information landscape that is already familiar, producing work that is clearly accountable to the needs of thousands of readers yearly. (One student remarked, “I read stuff on Wikipedia all the time—guess I’d better try to do a good job with this!”) By participating in the creation of public-facing information, they also gain a more nuanced sense of what the ACRL calls the “constructed and contextual” nature of authority, particularly in online contexts. The presentation will review experiences using Wikipedia assignments in first-year composition and upper-level literature classes.
Tools:
WikiEdu
Wiki Education serves as the bridge between academia and Wikipedia. University instructors participating in the program have assigned their students to add content to course-related articles on Wikipedia. Students gain key 21st century skills like media literacy, writing and research development, and critical thinking, while content gaps on Wikipedia get filled thanks to students’ efforts.
Key Terms/Tags:
Online research,
Directions for WikiEdu:
Resources: