Submissions:2014/Reflections on a collaborative editing assignment with 200+ students

Title of the submission

Reflections on a collaborative editing assignment with 200+ students

Themes (Proposal Themes - Community, Tech, Outreach, GLAM, Education)

Education

Type of submission (Presentation Types - Panel, Workshop, Presentation, etc)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Chris Leeder

E-mail address

cleeder@umich.edu

Username

Cleeder

US state or country of origin

MI

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

School of Information, University of Michigan

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

As part of the Wikipedia Education Program, I presented a Wikipedia editing workshop with our Campus Ambassador to an introductory undergraduate course of 200+ students in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. The intent of the assignment was to give undergraduates the experience of contributing to a resource that they all rely on and gaining understanding of how Wikipedia’s content is produced and how quality is maintained. This workshop was presented in association with a lecture on information literacy, to help students understand how online information is created and how to evaluate it. Students were then assigned them work in groups to collaboratively edit stub articles related to information technology and the Internet. Student groups could choose their topic from a curated list of 100 stub articles collected from various Wikiprojects, or propose their own. A detailed 6-week sequence of milestones was created on the Course Page, giving students a clear sequence of steps to complete and allowing plenty of time for group project management. In addition to their assignment to improve and expand an existing stub, they were also required to give peer feedback by constructively commenting on the Talk page of another group’s article. An assignment of this size and scope created was challenging to coordinate. It was an experiment to see if student groups could self-manage and effectively collaborative while contributing meaningfully to Wikipedia and learning how to edit. The size of the class also tested the functionality of the Course Page structure, which was likely not meant to manage a class of this size. Results of the assignment will be presented, including the grades assigned, the quality of the edited articles, level of success of student collaborative work, and reflections on the process of managing the assignment. This workshop will be of interest to anyone involved with or interested in the Education program and will present reflections on the challenges and promise of expanding the program to large undergraduates introductory courses.

Length of presentation/talk (see Presentation Types for lengths of different presentation types)

Curated talk: 15 Minutes

Will you attend WikiConference USA if your submission is not accepted?

Not sure

Slides or further information (optional)

Special request as to time of presentations

Interested attendees

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1. GastelEtzwane (talk) 15:36, 7 April 2014 (EDT)
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