Blogging Pedagogy

So I was preparing to start off class today with a brief warning about using Wikipedia as a source when I checked out the site's entry for "globalization."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization

I was struck by the number of "dubious - discuss" tags throughout.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Globalization#Dubious

In most of this section, the discussion centers around suggested wordings and rewrites, use of evidence, etc.

I will definitely work this into my class at some point in the next week or two, but wanted to know if anyone has used this feature of Wikipedia as a teaching tool.

This is another great opportunity to get students participating in a collaborative writing space outside of the classroom:

The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence was officially launched today with a modest amount of speechifying and the announcement of an intriguing new experiment to create a Wikipedia-style community-authored book about how to use communities in business.

Check out We Are Smarter Than Me

In my class today, we edited the Wikipedia entry for the novel we've been reading - Microserfs.

We began by discussing the basics of Wikipedia - what kind of resource it is, how people use it (or how they should use it), and what rules apply when editing entries. Then we looked at the Wikipedia Novels Template. This gave students an idea of the rules of the game and what should or should not (according to the Wikipedia community) go into an article about a novel. Then we spent the rest of the classing making additions.

While browsing wikipedia, I ran into the section on Wikibooks. These are books/textbooks on various topics. And, of course, they are edited on the wiki format. Check out the Composition Wikibook or the one on literary criticism. I wonder if these would be useful in the classroom. I also wonder if a good classroom exercise might be for students to write a section/chapter of one of these books.

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned a possible wiki assignment. Well, I ended up putting together an assignment, and a few others in the CWRL have created wikis of their own. Those of us in the Lab are using these wikis as a way to get students to collectively define terms and concepts. In this sense, these wikis are kind of a mini wikipedia. Noah Mass is using a wiki in his

Here's (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71667-0.html?tw=rss.technology) a news story from Wired News presented as a Wiki for readers to edit. Those of you using Wikis in your classes this fall may find the directions ("Don't change the quotes") an interesting place to start discussions about Wikis.