This session presents a paradoxical thesis: that everything we think is wrong about Wikipedia is exactly why teachers should be teaching it. A community college professor shares his experiences -- and his students’ -- in working with the Wiki Education Program in delivering Wikipedia-based assignments in the college classroom.
As the OLC turns 25, there may be no greater enigma related to online learning over the past quarter-century than Wikipedia, the online repository for human knowledge that everyone loves to hate. It is the bane of academia. The butt of jokes on late-night television. Home to vandalism and chauvinism and inaccuracy. A respite for students facing an impending deadline for a research project.
And yet, despite our attempts to shame it into oblivion, the site remains steadfast, if not stalwart, and shows no signs of slowing down as we anticipate the next 25 years of online learning. As the 5th most-visited website on the planet, home to nearly 50 million articles (or print the equivalent of 3,000 texts) -- there may be no greater repository for the entirety of human knowledge than Wikipedia.
And it might be said that academia may be in the process of revising its long-standing ire towards Wikipedia, exemplified best by “Wiki Education” -- the organization responsible for managing the Wikipedia Education Program in the U.S. and Canada -- which aids faculty in creating Wikipedia-based assignments for real classroom delivery. Wiki Education provides help guides, training modules, and offers the scaffolding by which faculty can create -- and implement -- courses in which students “enroll” and make official contributions to Wikipedia through vetted research and quality writing. In the most recent term (Winter/Spring 2019), 400 courses at over 250 colleges & universities collaborated with Wiki Education to deliver instruction in disciplines as varied as w/ history, marine biology, law, genetics, organic geochemistry, psychology, journalism, anatomy, politics, geography, neuroscience, and of course, English. Over 8,000 students added close to 6 million words to Wikipedia, which equates to about 29 copies of Moby-Dick. In one semester.
For the last 5 years, my community college students have participated in this process, and I’ve witnessed their involvement as a holistic alternative to traditional college assignments. Students arrive in my classes expecting to compose stodgy essays, intended for an audience of one (i.e., me, their professor) which inevitably end up in my recycling bin. Instead, I tell my students that their writing and their research can live on for eternity, and have a real, tangible impact on the world.
But the participation in this discourse is not without complications. Wikipedia is regularly prone to vandalism, written mainly by men, requires technologies that many communities lack, and it is Western-biased. It is for these reasons, particularly, that Wikipedia should be the center of online learning, discourse, and debate over the next 25 years.
This lecture will highlight many of Wikipedia’s wrongs, while also articulating how using Wikipedia in academia -- especially in online settings -- allows the next generation of college students a pragmatic yet transformative educational experience.