St Louis Beacon, 18 September 2013 link
Joan_E._Strassmann (T-H-L)Lots of teachers tell students to stay away from Wikipedia. At Washington University, Joan Strassmann has her students write articles for it.
Her undergraduate course in behavioral ecology is an officially designated Wikipedia course, where students learn not only about subjects like social insects but also about how to translate their scientific knowledge into terms the Wikipedia-using public can understand.
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“It’s really the perfect venue. It’s very energizing for students to see their work elsewhere, where their siblings or their grandmother or their roommate can see it. They see it makes a difference.”
They also can see how critical outsiders can be, like when one of her students saw an article trashed as “vandalism” and taken down. Strassmann and the class disagreed, and a spirited back-and-forth ensued that helped reinforce the point of using Wikipedia in the first place.
“You just can’t buy the positive outcome of that kind of energy for the intellectual process,” she said. “This is like a free real-world intellectual experience. It’s fantastic.
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Student Grant Schalet said he used to have a vague notion of how Wikipedia worked, but the class has changed that.
“I always had this perception that Wikipedia was modified and articles were overseen by some knowledge base,” he said. “When Dr. Strassmann guided us through the way you could just go in and edit, it was empowering for undergraduates.
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“A lot of them will take rejection well, take the comments and go back and fix it. Sometimes it’s not clear, and it’s a little more difficult. Someone may delete all their work and they don’t understand why that happens. It’s hard to understand it’s a group forum around the world.”
And at this point, that worldwide feedback, from people who may be even more expertise than someone on the faculty, doesn’t seem to be scaring anyone, said TA Jason Scott.
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In a way, Strassmann said, that kind of sharing is what Wikipedia is all about, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be part of any student’s academic experience.
“Everyone should embrace it and educate people about it,” she said. “That’s where students are going to go first. You may tell them not to, but that’s where students go, so you might as well use that to their advantage and help them understand how to use it. If there’s a problem with Wikipedia, it should be fixed.
Now I know where to go for a free real-world intellectual experience.