Submissions/Editing Wikipedia as an assignment: experiences at university

From Wikimania 2012 • Washington, D.C., USA

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

139

Title of the submission

Editing Wikipedia as assignment: experiences at university

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Lila Pagola

E-mail address

lilapagola@gmail.com

Username

Lpagola

Country of origin

Argentina

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
  • Universidad Nacional de Villa María
  • Wikimedia Argentina
Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Editing Wikipedia as assignment: experiences at university

A report and methodological notes

This talk refers two experiences editing Wikipedia within university, analysing some common pedagogical challenges. The first experience is an assignment for students, and the second is a workshop with teachers and graduate students as an offer of extramural studies (“extensión universitaria”). Methodologies used and main challenges faced during implementation are analysed in order to share experience and receive feedback.

1- About the “assignment”: Students must choose an specific scholar topic of their interest, and search into Wikipedia how that topic is covered. After this first information gathering, they choose an aspect to edit, improve or a topic for writing a new article. The assignment is scheduled in 4 months length, in order to do gradual advances from time to time to the article's life, and allow the interaction with the Wikipedia community. Within the course (Multimedia Design and Production), the assignment allows a practical introduction to topics such us: creation, access and representation of knowledge, free licenses, collaborative environments, on line community organization and some technical features of group ware software, all this in a kind of “first person approach”. This particular experience has been done by 2 years (2010 and 2011), with a group of 10-12 students of Multimedia design, within a career of Audiovisual Design. Since 2011, the assignment is being proposed in collaboration with the Professor of “Audiovisual research methodologies”, since both professors have discovered similar problems regarding information management, organization and scholar regulations when dealing with sources. This experience recovers some aspects of a previous one, done with college students of Photography since 2007.

2- Editing Wikipedia at the university library: The other experience this talk is going to briefly refer is a workshop done in August 2011 at the National University of Villa María, as an offer of extramural studies, for teachers and general public. The workshop took place at the Library, which have some computers for academic use, and lasted 20 hours (4 meeting of 4 hours, and 4 hours of on line work on a LMS). The workshop has 21 participants, teachers and graduate students.

Common pedagogical challenges: Opposite to a well known concern of teachers dealing with Wikipedia, main challenges faced for both experiences are not technical, but related with information management skills (when building the article) and about understanding Wikipedia community dynamics in contrast with scholar tradition (when editing). Some exception of this could be made just related to uploading content to Commons. This talk points out some facts evidenced for this experiences.

Track
Length of presentation/talk
25 Minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes, but I depend on scholarship.

Slides or further information (optional)

I will used a presentation.

Special request as to time of presentations

None

Interested attendees

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  1. GastelEtzwane (talk) 23:02, 18 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Zellfaze (talk) 16:10, 19 March 2012 (UTC) Highly interested[reply]
  3. Ldavis (WMF) (talk) 23:08, 21 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  4. --Brest (talk) 00:16, 22 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  5. IbrahimPsy111 (talk) 17:51, 23 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  6. ToniSant (talk) 11:12, 31 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  7. MyNameWasTaken (talk) 20:57, 16 April 2012 (UTC)[reply]
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