Flickr:Akhilsunnithan

By Eleanor Yang Su, California Watch

Teachers who once shunned the idea of students citing Wikipedia on class assignments now are embracing the Web site as a teaching tool.

Dozens of teachers at high schools and universities – including several in California – are assigning their students to write and edit entries for the online encyclopedia. The projects are designed to help students improve their research and writing skills, while adding to the public knowledge.

Sheldon Gen, an associate professor at San Francisco State University, asked students to write Wikipedia entries for an environmental policy class. His graduate students chose topics ranging from Mendocino County’s ban of genetically modified organisms to recent amendments to the Clean Air Act. Gen said some students initially were skeptical of Wikipedia and the assignment.

“The perception among a lot of people is that Wikipedia is not a particularly good source for newsworthy, policy-worthy information. My students shared that skepticism,” Gen said. “But all of them said at the end that they really liked the project. One thing they truly appreciated is they published articles that are now part of the public dialogue.”

Eric Goldman, an associate professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, said he warned his students that the editing process for Wikipedia entries could be ruthless.

“The students felt a lot of stress that their entries would be edited into nonsense,” Goldman said. “As it turned out, in the second course I taught, the students were almost disappointed that they got virtually no feedback at all.”

The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, has worked with 24 universities in an initiative to improve the U.S. public policy entries on the site. Professors at UC Berkeley, the University of San Francisco and USC also participated.

The Wikimedia Foundation recently announced that it is expanding the project to all topic areas and countries. Foundation spokesman Frank Schulenburg said teachers began assigning students Wikipedia entries in the early days of the site, and the foundation liked the idea and decided to support it. The foundation has not always been able to keep up with the demand for sufficient support and help in navigating Wikipedia’s technical aspects.

In fact, some professors say they have opted out of projects because they lacked adequate support from Wikipedia to keep students on track. Goldman acknowledged that while rewarding, the project took considerably more time than expected, and he’s not sure he will do it again.

Next spring, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to begin a pilot program with a high school teacher in Virginia to see how younger students do. Some high school teachers already have experimented with assignments on their own.

James Butler, a high school teacher in North Carolina, has been assigning Wikipedia projects to his Advanced Placement biology students for three years and says the experience has been “profoundly beneficial.”

One of Butler’s students, Timothy Hatfield Jr., 17, spent months combing through scientific journals, articles and books to help write and edit a 5,200-word article on the loggerhead sea turtle. He analyzed reference material from several countries and attained permission from photographers to publish their work on the site.

Hatfield made 476 edits to the article, all tracked on the Web site, and the article eventually earned featured status, a designation fewer than 1 percent of all entries receive.

“I learned how to truly research and find reputable sources,” Hatfield said. “There’s always going to be someone that challenges you. You can’t leave room for assumptions.”

Eleanor Yang Su is a contributor for California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Learn more at www.californiawatch.org.

Flickr:throwthedamnthing

By Anne Nelson

From what I can tell, most of my fellow educators spend more time criticizing Wikipedia than engaging with it. The conversation tends to go round in a fairly tiresome circle: The first educator points to an article on the subject of his/her expertise and points to a glaring error to demonstrate that the whole enterprise is worthless. The interlocutor responds with a (highly debated) study to argue that “Wikipedia is more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica.”

But neither side comes to terms with the real Wikipedia revolution: It represents a restructuring of the architecture of knowledge. In the decade since its founding, the crowdsourced platform has grown exponentially, radically improved its content, and established a firm foothold in the online environment, now ranking as the fifth most-visited site in the world. The entire enterprise is based on Wikipedia’s utopian vision, as spelled out on the back of the staff business cards: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”

Campus Ambassadors

That said, many observers — starting with the Wikimedia Foundation itself — realize that this vision is far from realized. This has led the foundation to launch a series of initiatives designed to improve the infrastructure and broaden participation. One of the most intriguing developments is the Public Policy Initiative and its corps of campus ambassadors.

The challenges are formidable. Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the two-thirds of the world’s population that has yet to gain access to the Internet. The creation of Wikipedia content has striking limitations, even among the 400 million users who visit the site every month. According to Wikipedia’s own estimates, only 0.02-0.03 percent of visitors actively contribute to articles.

And although technically, content can be created by anyone with an online account, the pattern of participation is admittedly skewed. According to Barry Newstead, the foundation’s chief global development officer, “Eighty percent of our page views are from the Global North, and 83 percent of our edits.” The English language Wikipedia’s content and participation far outstrip those for its 270 other languages, especially non-Western. Of the active contributors, between 80 and 85 percent are male, and half are under 22. Furthermore, participation has plateaued (and even declined) over the last few years, settling in at somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 active editors per month in all languages.

What are the obstacles to growth? First of all, “Wikipedian” culture is known for its contentious behavior, especially toward newcomers who haven’t mastered the arcane style and coding. One result is that the content has become skewed toward geek topics, featuring state-of-the-art articles on technology, science fiction and military history, with more erratic offerings in the humanities and social sciences.

Straightening a Skewed Pattern of Participation

In early July, the Wikimedia Foundation renewed its efforts to improve the balance by holding its first Higher Education Summit as part of the Public Policy Initiative. According to the foundation leadership, the goals of the year-old project are to:

• bring in more quality content in underserved fields, starting with public policy;
• narrow the gender gap by recruiting increased female participation;
• improve diversity of contributors, and
• make the initiation process more user-friendly.

Backed by a new strategic plan and a $1.2 million grant from the Stanton Foundation, the Wikipedia Public Policy Initiative was born. The foundation decided that the natural focal point for the effort was academia. Colleges and universities were, after all, the traditional centers of learning — and it made sense to look to students who were researching and writing papers as potential contributors of content.

Mentoring Professors and Students

The missing link was the Wikipedia knowledge. This was addressed by the creation of a cohort of Wikipedia “ambassadors” to coach and mentor professors and students through the wickets. Fifty-four campus ambassadors were selected over 2010-2011, charged with offering on-site support in classroom and personal tutorial settings.

These were often students with an extensive (and successful) record of creating and editing Wikipedia content. In other cases, they were university librarians, tech support, and other staff who took on the challenge as part of their classroom support services. (At the summit, Sue Gardner, director of the Wikimedia Foundation, proudly pointed out that almost half of the campus ambassadors are female.) The campus ambassadors were complemented by 91 online ambassadors, experienced Wikipedians who offer support to students in any school.

The United States was divided into 10 regions, each assigned a regional ambassador. Professors from 24 colleges and universities signed up as inaugural Wikipedia Teaching Fellows to participate. In return, the professors made a commitment to assigning Wikipedia content creation as part of their course requirements, and to stage the assignments over the course of the semester, to allow for an editorial learning curve.

By coincidence, I had created an unwitting control group for this effort. Last fall I assigned my Media & Society class at Bard College to write or edit a Wikipedia entry, unaware that there was a Wikimedia program for classroom support. I had a few Wikipedia edits under my belt, but I was unprepared for my students’ struggles with Wikipedia policies on issues such as notability, verifiability and sourcing. These policies are highly specific, not always intuitive, and don’t necessarily mirror academic practice.

PBS MediaShift

My international students writing on foreign subjects had far more trouble than my U.S. students in publishing their articles, even if they were of comparable quality (partly, I believe, because it’s harder to provide approved citations for local information about countries such as Afghanistan and Burma). I was also remiss in not directing my students toward the sandbox to develop their articles before posting them — leading to some swift and merciless deletions.

For many of us, the Higher Education Summit was a welcome opportunity to meet campus and online ambassadors and to hear how fellow professors worked with the project in the classroom. I was surprised to learn that while some of the professors were experienced Wikipedians, many of them had little editing experience with the platform. This was not regarded as a problem. The program was structured to task the ambassadors with Wikipedia skills, allowing professors to focus on shaping syllabi and course content. (The summit’s invitees included professors of law, anthropology, political science, and literature.)

At the same time, there are many signs that the Wikimedia Foundation is eager to make the editing process more user-friendly. It has been conducting usability studies to see where the bumps are. Wikipedia has been expanding its live help and a rich trove of learning materials for newbies. These resources are scattered across the Wikipedia terrain and not easy to locate, but the foundation is taking active steps to both build out and codify the materials. It’s also sponsoring some friendly competition with a leaderboard to monitor which classes are posting the most contributions over the semester, as well as a “What’s Hot” list of most edited articles by students.

The Wikimedia Foundation states that over the next five years it hopes to increase the number of readers to a billion, and the percentage of editors in the Global South to 37 percent. The international initiative is starting with Brazil, India and the Middle East/North Africa, which have already begun to receive advance guards of campus and online ambassadors. (The summit included academics from Brazil, India, Germany, the U.K. and Canada, as well as the U.S.)

The Wikimedia Foundation’s Newstead told the summit attendees that the organization is still struggling with the challenge of adapting to mobile platforms, the bridgehead for online media in much of the world. “At this point you can’t edit on mobile; it’s read-only,” he reported. “Most people who move to mobile stop surfing the web. They just surf apps.”

Whatever the challenges, the Wikipedia ambassadors are recruiting a new generation of professors and students to carry the vision forward. There are all kinds of creative challenges to adapting classroom assignments to the mission. Students like publishing their classwork online, but express frustration at team members who don’t pull their weight. Professors enjoy the classroom enthusiasm, but struggle with the mechanics of grading collaborative writing projects and articles that are edited by a broader community. Nonetheless, there’s every indication that the Wikimedia Foundation’s experiment in higher education will take Wikipedia to another stage of its wildly unpredictable ride.

Anne Nelson is an educator, consultant and author in the field of international media strategy. She created and teaches New Media and Development Communications at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She consults on media, education and philanthropy for Anthony Knerr & Associates. Her most recent book is Red Orchestra. She tweets as @anelsona, was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

This story was originally published by PBS MediaShift, covering the intersection of media and technology. Follow @PBSMediaShift for Twitter updates, or join us on Facebook.

http://youtu.be/5Xb5spS8pmE

Readers are parsing the difference between copying information verbatim without citing the source, and paraphrasing information gleaned from sources like Wikipedia.

One reader writes:

As a graduate student and researcher, 80% of what I do is not expressing original thoughts, but accurately understanding, coherently organizing, and properly attributing other people’s thoughts. I realize TurnItIn focuses on essays and term papers, not research, but perhaps what we really need is better education on how to attribute and use sources.

Another reader takes a step back and frames the conversation in terms of information ownership:

We are entering an age where ownership of information is becoming increasingly shared or indeterminate. Therefore, it’s time to re-think the concept of plagiarism.

This young generation of thinkers sees intellectual property very differently than my older generation does. I believe we are not far from an era where most information is considered public property and one’s intellectual value is measured by what one can do with information rather than by how much one knows. In this new world, plagiarism will become irrelevant. Of course, those who reject my hypothesis can always use technological solutions to address this fundamentally technological problem. Personally, I’d rather cultivate a paradigm shift in my own thinking about what I truly value in student writing. Changing my old attitudes is preferable to wrestling with out-dated notions of plagiarism that are doomed to become irrelevant by the middle of the 21st century. Like it or not, this new generation is going to re-define much of what us old timers take for granted.

A reference librarian says she believes Wikipedia is a legitimate resource to begin research, and paraphrasing is not plagiarism.

I explain that it is perfectly okay to use Wikipedia to start your research, because it can guide you to more specific sources. It is also okay to copy ideas from other sources, as long as you understand those ideas and can put them in your own words. After all, it is not reasonable to ask a sixteen year old to come up with an original insight into Shakespeare, the Civil Rights movement or the use of antibiotics. But we can certainly do a better job in helping those students understand what might constitute legitimate information sharing from legitimate sources as opposed to short-cuts that amount to cheating.

Another reader believes that using another source’s idea without reference is also plagiarism, whether or not the same words are used.

The whole point of plagiarism (which many confuse with copyright which punishes copying exact words) is that you’re copying someone else’s *idea* without attribution, not just their exact words.

This brings me back to the idea, written by Esther Wojcicki, about the importance of students learning the skills of a journalist: Collect and confirm information.

Lenny Gonzalez

Eighth grade students at Presidio Middle School share an iPad while working on a lesson.

There’s no argument that Silicon Valley startups have influenced how businesses operate. The fact that most companies now count social media strategy as a crucial part of their operation is a testament to the Internet culture infiltrating far beyond the Internet-only based businesses.

The same phenomenon is happening in education. Here are five ways tech-based startups in Silicon Valley have influenced education.

1. Social media

Not long ago, social media and education had absolutely nothing to do with one another. These days, it has become enmeshed in school policy and practice. Schools are figuring out guidelines for using Facebook. Teachers are using Twitter to engage and gauge student interaction. They’re using blogs and wikis to communicate and to teach. Parents are friending teachers and schools. “If you’re not on Facebook, it’s hard to communicate with us,” said Eric Sheninger, principal of New Milford High School in Bergen County, New Jersey. “Our new hub of real time information is Facebook. When I post things about kids’ accomplishments, and when students and parents comment, as a principal I’m proud.”

2. Grassroots growth

As with Mashable and Yelp, the use of Web 2.0 tools in education is proliferating from the ground up. Educators are finding each other online, teaming up, and sharing smart tactics on how best to inventively use tech to engage their students and keep up with the quickly changing world outside school walls. They meet and confer online with weekly Twitter meetups on #Edchat, and spread the word about best practices through Twitter and Facebook and their own blog, even if it means circumventing school rules.

3. User-generated content

Like Huffington Post, Flickr, Yelp, and the mother of all UGC sites, Wikipedia, forward-thinking educators are incorporating student-created media, feedback, essays, and blogs as part of the curriculum they teach in class. Rather than feeding their students information, they’re giving value and recognition to their students’ ideas and encouraging them to think for themselves.

4. Open-source education

As with Linux and Mozilla (creator of your Firefox browser), progressive educators are throwing open their classroom doors and sharing their knowledge with each other and with the world. They’re using content sites like Open Education Resources and CK12 to create and customize their own curriculum, and allowing others to access all of it.

5. Venture capital

There may come a day when schools can “go public,” so to speak, (as in have stockholders), but until then schools are finding ways to fund new initiatives through private investments. Organizations like NewSchool Venture Fund are fueling the growth of charter schools like Rocketship, Green Dot, and Aspire — and their progress is worth following.

Read more about trends in education.

• 6 Ways Social Media is Changing Education
• How Learning Environments are Changing
• Three Trends That Define the Future of Teaching and Learning
• Trends That Will Shape the Future of Curriculum