Después de la versión en inglés, abajo, versión en español

Sometimes innovation is the result of being in the right place at the right time as well as being flexible. I am an English as a foreign language teacher in central Mexico and a long time learner of Spanish. Needing intensive Spanish reading practice, I discovered the benefits of writing Wikipedia articles about Mexico (researching in Spanish, writing in English) to both myself and to the encyclopedia. Wanting to share this experience with my students, in Fall 2007, I designed and taught a Wikipedia-based class for ITESM-Campus Toluca’s most advanced English students as an experiment with support of my department.

ITESM students participate in an edit-a-thon in cooperation with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

As these students were already well-versed in vocabulary and grammar, real world practice or “authentic communication” was more important. As most language learners know, the best way to learn a language is to be immersed in a situation where its use is necessary. Computer technology, especially the virtual world of the Internet, has created a number of virtual “worlds” and social groups, not the least of which is the Wikipedia community. The goal in the Fall 2007 class was to introduce this virtual world of English language Wikipedia and explore ways to participate, culminating in the writing of a complete article from scratch as a final project. Mind you, this was before the advent of many of the programs the Wikimedia Foundation has today, such as the Wikipedia Global Education Program.

The class revolved around intercultural communication – learning about potential differences and strategies for coping. For this aspect of the course, the Wikipedia community was introduced as a culture, a group of people with a shared set of values and means by which they interrelate… something the students would have to adapt to as they learned how to write articles and deal with wiki mark up. As it was very different from any other English class they had ever experienced, almost all the students struggled in some way in the course. However, most improved their English language skills, based on TOEFL test scores taken before and after the semester. These findings were presented to the MexTESOL 2008 conference in León, Guanajuato, Mexico.

Leigh Thelmadatter, Regional Ambassador for Mexico

In 2008, I transferred to the Ciudad de México (Mexico City) or CCM campus of the same school system to establish and run their self access language learning laboratory (think of a hybrid of a traditional language lab and library). Since that time, I have done smaller Wikipedia-based assignments with students, writing smaller articles in groups and moving to translation exercises – mostly English language Wikipedia articles into Spanish. Translation has proven to be a good introduction to Wikipedia editing for many students. It is one way students can improve Wikipedia in their native language. It is easier to translate from one’s non-native language into one’s native language, but it has been noted that the English of the original article still causes transference errors into the Spanish version. This problem has been dealt with through peer review – students doing translation in groups, checking each other’s work and then groups exchanging translated articles for final review. This often leads to interesting discussions about how English and Spanish differ rhetorically, that is, how each writing style prefers to express information. This, too, is part of intercultural communication.

So far, there have been two major lessons learned from the use of Wikipedia. First, the demands of acculturating oneself into the Wikipedia community is a good experience in that many students experience the real frustrations and symptoms of culture shock. But this benefit is not for everyone. It is by far best for students who see the value in the experience, despite whatever frustrations might occur. In the Fall of 2011, I worked with four such students, who led on projects such as creating articles on Mexico’s Festival Internacional Cervantino. Not only did these students research and write articles in both Spanish and English, they also contacted Festival organizers and various international artists to obtain photographs and other assistance. Second, the use of translation assignments is also extremely useful. It provides a template of how Wikipedia articles are generally set up and is a good introduction to technical aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. It allows for learning through imitation, rather than learning abstract rules then guessing how to apply them. It also provides a way to work with Wikipedia which is less intense and easier to incorporate into classes, especially language classes.

ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México continues to be committed to developing working with Wikipedia. The campus library director, Lourdes Epstein has dedicated space in the facility for Club Wikipedia and students working on Wikipedia-related assignments. Several departments, including Global Studies, promote involvement with Wikipedia to their students and faculty. For the Spring 2012, a pilot program with the campus’s high school level International Baccalaureate program begins. A select group of students will set up semester-long projects based on their interests and abilities mentored by myself as part of their CAS or social service requirement.

Wikipedia es una cultura extranjera

A veces la innovación es el resultado tanto de encontrarse en el lugar indicado, en el momento indicado, como de ser una persona flexible. Yo enseño inglés en México y hace mucho tiempo que estudio y hablo español. Viéndome en la necesidad de practicar lectura en español de manera intensiva, descubrí los beneficios (tanto para mí como para la enciclopedia) de redactar artículos de Wikipedia sobre México (investigando en español y redactándolos en inglés). Con el deseo de compartir esta experiencia con mis alumnos, en la segunda mitad de 2007, diseñé e impartí, en el Campus Toluca del ITESM, un curso basado en Wikipedia, para los alumnos de inglés más avanzados, con el apoyo del departamento para el que trabajaba.

Como esos alumnos ya habían estudiado vocabulario y gramática en varios cursos, lo más importante, en términos de aprendizaje, consistía en la práctica de situaciones conversacionales auténticas. Como la mayoría de los estudiantes sabe, la mejor manera de aprender una lengua es la inmersión en una situación donde hablar sea imprescindible. La tecnología informática, sobre todo el mundo virtual de la Internet, ha creado muchos “mundos virtuales” y grupos sociales. La comunidad de colaboradores de Wikipedia es una de las más importantes. La meta de aquel curso de 2007 era doble: presentar el mundo virtual de Wikipedia en inglés y explorar las formas de colaboración con ese mundo; y esa meta se conseguía redactando de cero un artículo, como proyecto final. Hay que recordar que esto ocurrió antes del inicio de muchos de los programas actuales de la Fundación Wikimedia, tales como el Global Education.

El curso se centraba en la comunicación intercultural – aprender sobre las diferencias potenciales entre ambas culturas y las posibles estrategias de adaptación. Para cumplir con ese objetivo, se presentó a Wikipedia como una “cultura”; es decir, como a un grupo con valores compartidos y maneras de interactuar…algo que los alumnos debían adoptar mientras aprendían a redactar artículos y se familiarizaban con los aspectos tecnológicos del sitio. Dado que la propuesta difería mucho de cualquier otra clase de inglés que hubieran cursado previamente, casi todos los alumnos experimentaron distintos tipos de dificultades durante el semestre. Sin embargo, la mayoría mejoró su desempeño lingüístico en inglés, como lo mostraron los resultados del examen TOEFL (realizado antes y después del curso). Presenté toda la información recogida entonces en la conferencia de MexTESOL, realizada en León, Estado de Guanajuato (Estados Unidos Mexicanos), en 2008.

En 2008, comencé a trabajar en el Campus Ciudad de México con el fin de establecer y coordinar el laboratorio de aprendizaje autodirigido (self access), que es una mezcla de laboratorio de idiomas tradicional y biblioteca. Desde entonces, junto con mis alumnos, realizo tareas menores para Wikipedia, como redactar en grupos artículos más breves y encomendar la traducción de artículos, principalmente del inglés al español. A muchos estudiantes, la traducción les resultó una buena introducción a la preparación de artículos de Wikipedia. Es una manera de que ellos mejoren Wikipedia en su lengua materna. Es más fácil traducir de otra lengua a la propia, aunque todavía se nota que el inglés de los originales causa errores de transferencia en la versión española. Esta cuestión se resolvió mediante la revisión de las distintas versiones entre los mismos traductores. La traducción se realiza en grupos, revisando cada uno de los traductores los borradores de sus compañeros, y después se intercambian los artículos completos en vistas de una revisión final. Frecuentemente, esto lleva a debates interesantes acerca de las diferencias retóricas entre el inglés y el español; o sea, acerca de cómo, en cada lengua, las figuras retóricas expresan la misma información. Esto, también, forma parte de la comunicación cultural.

Hasta la fecha, se obtuvieron dos lecciones importantes gracias al uso de Wikipedia. Primero, las exigencias de aculturación de cada participante a la comunidad de Wikipedia es una experiencia valiosa, porque así muchos alumnos pueden experimentar las dificultades y los síntomas reales del choque cultural. Sin embargo, no todos se benefician de esto; los que más provecho sacan son los alumnos que perciben el valor de la experiencia a pesar de los obstáculos. En la segunda mitad de 2011, trabajé con cuatro de estos alumnos, que se abocaron a la redacción de los artículos relativos al Festival Internacional Cervantino. Estos estudiantes no solo investigaron y redactaron los artículos en inglés y español, sino que también se comunicaron con los organizadores del festival y con varios artistas internacionales para obtener fotografías y otros tipos de ayuda. En segundo lugar, las tareas de traducción son extremadamente útiles porque proveen un molde para el formato de los artículos de Wikipedia y son buenas también para introducir los aspectos técnicos de Wikipedia. Traducir permite aprender por imitación en lugar de primero aprender reglas abstractas y luego intentar aplicarlas de alguna manera. También muestra un modo de trabajar con Wikipedia que es menos intenso y más fácil de incorporar en las clases, sobretodo en clases de lenguas extranjeras.

El Campus Ciudad de México no ha cejado en su compromiso de colaborar con Wikipedia. Lourdes Epstein, Directora de la Biblioteca del campus, apartó un espacio especial, en el mismo edificio de la biblioteca, para el Club Wikipedia y para otros alumnos que colaboren en tareas afines. Varios departamentos universitarios, como el de Estudios Globales, promueven la participación de sus alumnos y docentes. En el primer semestre del corriente año, dará comienzo un programa piloto en el que participarán los alumnos del Programa del Diploma del Bachillerato Internacional del campus. A fin de cumplir con el requisito de servicio social “CAS”, un grupo seleccionado de alumnos va a idear proyectos, asesorados por mí, de un semestre de duración, basados en sus intereses y habilidades.

By Professor Juliana Bastos Marques – UNIRIO (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil)

One late night in 2006, while I was struggling with my PhD thesis, I went looking for a quick reference for a Latin author in Portuguese Wikipedia, only to find out that there was nothing about him there (it was the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus). Indignant, I finally decided to register in order to write the new article myself. Soon I realized that was the tip of an iceberg: a lot of work was needed on other history-related topics, and I needed more help.

Professor Juliana Bastos Marques at the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit in July 2011

Wikipedian turned professor some years later, I thought it would be a good idea to recruit my students to write some good content and fix the disturbing mistakes we repeatedly found. Indeed, the state of the Portuguese Wikipedia, while counting more than 700,000 articles, is still usually written by non-specialists; this means several outdated theories and approaches, low-quality references and incomplete information. My other concern was quite practical: I needed to convince my own students that the additional information they used for my classes and exams was NOT to be looked for on Wikipedia, to avoid plagiarism for a start! In fact, all my friends who taught at primary and secondary schools also had the same problem: whether we want or not, Wikipedia is probably the most popular learning material in Brazil – and, in the current state, a bad one.

Serendipity came to my doorstep soon, when I first read an article about the Public Policy Initiative in Inside Higher Ed in September 2010, and later attended an event with Jessie Wild and Kul Wadhwa from Wikimedia Foundation on the following January, only to learn that WMF had plans for the expansion of the Global Education Program in Brazil. I also had the opportunity to attend the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit, last July, in Boston. While I was only a spectator there, for my class would start in August, it was very exciting to see that other professors had already come to similar conclusions as to the value of Wikipedia for the university.

With the course taught, mistakes made and also success achieved, I have some input to share on my experience. First of all, I’d have in mind that the goal of using Wikipedia in class is ultimately to improve weak articles. This works perfectly for the case of the Portuguese Wikipedia, and certainly with dozens of other languages. In the case of more developed Wikipedias such as the English one, I believe this means a careful selection of potential new or stub articles to work with.

The course I taught improved substantially a set of articles related to Roman History, but it was peculiar in the sense that it was an elective course with 25 students. They had a combination of traditional lectures with work in the lab, always with the aid of a Campus Ambassador (who happened not to be a student, but a very proficient and participating member of the Portuguese Wikimedia community), two also very proficient Online Ambassadors and a dedicated mailing list. All students worked in their sandboxes until I graded and revised the content, and the Ambassadors approved the technical Wikipedia format, code and writing. This was crucial in preventing early deletions and distrust from the community, which would certainly discourage the students. Also, I decided to engage the Portuguese-speaking Wikipedia community early on, mostly through the Wikimedia Brasil mailing list, in order to make them aware of what we were planning. The members were very supportive and eventually helped the students in their discussion pages, teaching them to avoid plagiarism and to write with neutrality.

In due time, I realized I should not be concerned whether I was creating a new set of editors, which I believe to be a somehow misleading goal. All Wikipedia editors are volunteers, and their will to contribute will always be beyond a class, a grade or our encouragement as teachers. However, I feel we have created multipliers: even if they never edit again, my students will eventually teach on their own, and they will tell their students about how knowledge is never ready and finished, is never to be trusted without critical reflection, and can be improved through their own learning and work.

The students very soon learned that the set of skills they needed to practice was somehow different from what it was expected in academia. After all, writing for encyclopedias requires strict objectivity, impartiality and anonymity, so that the voice of the writer is not to be distinguished. However, together with other skills such as knowing when and how to use references correctly, or learning how to distinguish and explain different points of view regarding a subject, these abilities helped them understand the subject and their own learning results in a much more clear and precise way than before. For instance, I had to go with them phrase per phrase sometimes, until they could really master what they meant to say – a careful dynamic that all professors know is impossible to follow when grading a pile of papers.

Last but not least, the students ultimately learned that an encyclopedia is a starting point. And it was their own work that could make it a solid starting point for both themselves and any other reader. For the next semester, starting here in Brazil in February, I will continue using the opportunity that Wikipedia gives for professors and students to teach, to learn and to work with quality and rigor, while sharing our knowledge from the often closed corridors of academia to the entire world. I’d easily say that this has been to me the biggest reward of using Wikipedia for teaching.

CUNY professor Michael Mandiberg was drawn into editing Wikipedia like many subject matter experts are – by editing pages in his area of expertise, art and design. As Michael began to tinker around with Wikipedia more and more, he started to think of ways to incorporate it into his coursework for his History of Design and Digital Media course at the College of Staten Island.

“Traditionally for term papers, students go and do some research about a particular topic, and they demonstrate their mastery by regurgitating some facts about it. Hopefully there’s a thesis, but sometimes it’s just a summary. Reading these papers is pretty boring, and the ritualistic production of those papers is kind of useless and in a way tedious for the students as well,” he says. “I decided to harness some of that creative energy for the greater good by channeling that work into something that has a utility beyond just the ritual of the classroom.”

Michael was no stranger to useful assignments; for previous courses, he’d had students redesign local nonprofits’ websites. In another assignment geared toward understanding licenses, he had asked students to upload freely licensed images from Flickr to Wikimedia Commons. Past students had also contributed to Wikipedia Illustrated. In the fall 2011 term, he wanted his students to write Wikipedia articles on designers or design principles referenced in the course’s textbook. Michael spent some time conceiving the course project, and then stumbled across the Wikipedia Education Program.

He recruited a reference librarian at College of Staten Island, Mark Polger, and asked one of his students, Nicole Boffa, to become Campus Ambassadors.User:SMasters filled out Michael’s pod as an Online Ambassador. Mark handled teaching students how to use the library and the basics of how to use references on Wikipedia, while Nicole helped students understand editing basics. User:SMasters was there to help when disputes arose, which did a handful of times, including twice in which the individuals where the subject matter of the Wikipedia articles students were writing reverted some of their edits.

Students from Michael Mandiberg's class got a personalized tour of a Museum of Modern Art exhibit, then worked with Wikipedians from the Wikimedia New York chapter to write Wikipedia articles on the works.

That experience in itself – students’ relationship to power – is one of four reasons Michael is glad he asked his students to edit Wikipedia for class. He gave students extra credit for contacting the subject of their Wikipedia article to request they release a photo of themselves or their work under a CC-BY-SA license, and gave bonus points if the subject actually did so.

“These students are suddenly engaging with the subject of their writing directly,” Michael says. “Is it okay to email someone you’re writing a research paper about? No. Is it okay to write somebody you’re writing about on Wikipedia for your class? Completely. You can write them and say, ‘I’m writing for Wikipedia for my class. I would really like it if you could give me an image of your work or an image of you to put on that page.’ I watched the students who followed through on that become transformed as students. And many of them used the word ‘empowering’ in their reflective papers to describe the experience.”

The second reason, Michael says, is that students gained valuable research skills. He asked students to write reflective papers at the end of the term, and students reported that the work they did with Mark to prepare to write their Wikipedia articles was extremely valuable.

“They almost all said that it was the most research they had ever done,” Michael says. “They used the library more than they’d ever used, and they learned substantially about research.”

Third, Michael says, was that students were more motivated because they felt like their assignments were working toward a good cause or the greater good of society.

The fourth and final of Michael’s reasons for liking the Wikipedia assignment is that students who are used to getting by on college papers by close paraphrasing or outright plagiarizing works discover they simply can’t do that with a Wikipedia assignment, since students had to cite every sentence. Writing for Wikipedia made it easier for him to catch students’ plagiarism early, and he was able to help students understand why they needed to use original voice.

“This assignment was really hard for the students,” he says. “I asked them to write at least 1,200 words, and most of them ended up somewhere around 900 because writing for Wikipedia is different from the writing they’re used to and requires so much more work. They’re used to just filling up 5 pages and getting credit for it.” But, he adds, students came around to the idea. “In their reflection papers, almost all the students said they really didn’t want to do the assignment, that it was really hard, but they were glad they did. It was highly productive.”

Michael’s students also got the chance to see the real-world impact of their work through an event organized by the Wikimedia New York chapter, including Ambassador Richard Knipel. Ten of Michael’s students joined him and some Wikimedia New York editors at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, where they received a tour of the Talk to Me exhibit with educators from the MOMA. Students then worked with Wikipedians from the chapter to create articles about the exhibit and its works. Michael says it was transformative for the students who went, as the museum educators and the Wikipedians treated students with respect, encouraging them to share their views and contribute to Wikipedia.

“For these students, it was mind-blowing that they could sit down and collaborate with these experienced Wikipedians. What the students realized was they had valuable knowledge, and that was really amazing for them,” he says. “The students who did that field trip came back to the classroom with much more confidence.”

Michael is excited by the experience his students had on Wikipedia last term, and he’s looking forward to giving his Ph.D. students at the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2012 an assignment on Wikipedia as well. And just like his students, he’s glad their contributions are helping the greater good, enhancing the content freely available about design.

“We did something worthwhile,” he says. “This section of Wikipedia is a little less of a blind spot.”

For about ten days in December, Frank Schulenburg, Moushira Elamrawy, and I met with various professors, students, and local Wikipedians in Cairo, Egypt. The initial Arabic Catalyst Project trip from October showed that there is potential in working with faculty members and students on improving the Arabic Wikipedia; this December trip made clear that there is a very high level of interest among people at universities in Cairo to do so.

The Cairo pilot project – the newest part of the Wikipedia Education Program – will begin in early 2012. Its primary goal will be to improve the quality and quantity of the Arabic Wikipedia, which is currently very small (only about 150,000 articles) even though as the fifth most common language in the world Arabic has about 400 million speakers worldwide (compare this to Japanese, which has about 130 million speakers worldwide but almost 800,000 Wikipedia articles). As part of the Cairo pilot, students from Ain Shams University and Cairo University will contribute new content to the Arabic Wikipedia or translate content from another language into Arabic on Wikipedia. The plan is to have about 4-6 classes in the pilot, and only the top 3-15 students from each of these classes will actually contribute to Wikipedia. We want to keep the pilot very small, to make sure that we’ve figured out what works and doesn’t work before we expand the project to more people and more places.

Wikipedia Education Program staff meet with Arabic Wikimedians in Cairo, Egypt, in December 2011.

We were surprised by how many instructors in Egypt were excited about participating in the project. Everybody we talked to was convinced that growing and enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia would be a good idea – in fact, many professors and students told us they felt the responsibility to make free knowledge in Arabic better. We have identified about six professors for participation in the pilot, based on their understanding of Wikipedia, their genuine interest in enhancing the Arabic Wikipedia, and the writing skills of their students. Almost all the students we met also showed genuine interest in learning more about Wikipedia and contributing to it.

We are also very happy to have the support of local Wikipedians. Essam Sharaf – a long-term Wikipedian and a student at Cairo University – connected us with professors and students, helped us maneuver the streets and campuses of Cairo, and enhanced our understanding of Egypt’s social, cultural, and political context. Frank, Moushira, and I also met with an active group of Cairo-based Arabic Wikipedians and went on a photo-walk with them, during which we took pictures of Old Cairo and then uploaded them onto Wikimedia Commons (including the panoramic photo now on this Wikipedia article). We’ve also been communicating with other members of the Arabic Wikipedia community, whom we’ve found to be extremely helpful and inspiring. We feel very fortunate that this group of enthusiastic, smart, and motivated volunteers has expressed genuine interest in becoming Wikipedia Ambassadors (who teach students how to edit Wikipedia) and laying the foundation to make the Cairo pilot a success.

-Annie Lin (آني/سمر)
Wikipedia Education Program Manager

Not only had Karl Wahlen never edited Wikipedia prior to September 2011, he didn’t even know he could. That all changed when Karl enrolled in a University of Pittsburgh class called Sociology of Marriage, taught by Wikipedian Piotr Konieczny, a graduate student and a Teaching Fellow from Department of Sociology, and the Pittsburgh native found himself having to write a Wikipedia article as part of his coursework.

“When I learned on the first day that that I was going to be doing a Wikipedia project, I was rather confused,” Karl admits. “Honestly, when I first thought about it, I wondered how you worked on it, as I did not know at that point that you could even have an account on wikipedia, much less how it worked or how you used it.”

Karl Wahlen is an avid dog lover along with being an undergraduate student at the University of Pittsburgh (pictured with his dog JJ).

Karl’s a busy student. He’s majoring in psychology, sociology, BPhil (BPhil is an honors degree where he does the equivalent of a master’s thesis in his undergraduate years), and biology, while also getting a certificate in the conceptual foundations of medicine, and a minor in economics and chemistry. His multidisciplinary interests led Karl to want to work on the article on Joint custody in the United States, which had elements of psychology and sociology. The article had languished for years without many sources or without being particularly well-written (you can see the version before Karl and his classmates started working on it here. Karl’s input helped bring the article up to meet the Did you know requirements, which landed the article on Wikipedia’s main page in late November. By early December, the article had passed the Good Article review process as well.

Karl credits help from his professor, Piotr Konieczny, for forcing students to write Wikipedia articles for class. A longtime supporter of the Schools and universities projects on Wikipedia, Piotr is also an Online Ambassador and instructor in the Wikipedia Education Program in the United States. Piotr’s course was the first to participate in the American Sociology Association’s new Wikipedia Initiative.

“Our instructor really helped on every step of the way, especially when showing us how to interact with the community,” Karl says. “You occasionally get people who are not the nicest when they disagree with you, but in general individuals tend to remain respectful with each other, and for the most part all criticism ends up leading to a higher quality article in the end, which is a good thing.”

In fact, the research skills he gained through doing the Wikipedia assignment actually helped him tremendously in another class he’s taking this term on research methods. Learning to cite every sentence and making sure that every claim he made could be backed up to a reliable source for Wikipedia taught him valuable research and writing skills.

“I still maintain that this Wikipedia project made a world of difference in being able to write well,” Karl says. “And unlike a term paper, which is thrown away at the end of the semester, all the work that goes into a Wikipedia article continues to help people even after the class ends. I like knowing that the joint custody (United States) article is being read by 80+ people a day.”

Karl’s research for the Wikipedia assignment led him to want to add more to Wikipedia. He’s already created stub articles on Split custody and Sole custody, which he intends to expand in the near future.

“I will absolutely continue to edit after the class is over,” Karl says. “My instructor was outstanding and it will be a nice way to keep in touch with him. And not only can I do this to keep providing new information to others, but it also looks pretty darned good on a resume to say you spend your free time working on making articles to help people than sitting around watching TV. Thankfully, I enjoy doing this, so it is not like a chore to do.”

Professor Jonathan Obar

I was never a fan of Wikipedia. In fact, I was quite skeptical when I first heard about the Wikipedia Global Education Program. How things have changed.

About a year ago, I remember hearing that some folks from the Wikimedia Foundation were planning to visit our College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University to try to recruit faculty for the Wikipedia Education Program. I remember walking to the meeting thinking, hmm, well I guess as a professor in a communication school it’ll be cool to meet some people who work for a major social media site. I’m not a fan of Wikipedia though, I don’t trust it… (puff up chest here) I’m an academic after all; my work is well-researched, credible, trustworthy, not like that amateurish stuff on Wikipedia. Just let me find one of my students citing Wikipedia in a paper so that I can write on their submission in big, red letters YOU DO NOT CITE WIKIPEDIA IN MY CLASS.

The dirty little secret of course was that I was using Wikipedia all the time. Whenever I would begin a research project I would type a concept into Google and of course a Wikipedia article would come up. I’d take a quick look, check out the references, begin to map the concept in my mind, all the while feeling unsure that I could trust what I was reading. I did this all the time. As an academic, this was my dirty little secret.

One year later and how things have changed. I am now a Wikipedia Teaching Fellow as well as a volunteer member of the Wikipedia Education Program’s outreach team helping to connect universities in Canada to the initiative, determined to change the minds of skeptics all over the world who see Wikipedia as I once did.

So what’s changed? Look, I’ve used Facebook in the classroom, I’ve used Twitter. I’ve used closed wikis, blogs and other new media technologies and I am convinced (and I don’t think I’m overstating things here) that Wikipedia is among the most innovative tools for e-pedagogy and e-learning currently available.

This “Wikipedia in the classroom” project begins where most “traditional” research assignments leave off. Students are still researching topics related to course content, they’re still synthesizing sources, they’re still writing; that’s where most “traditional” research projects leave off. What the Wikipedia project then adds is new media literacy development. Students learn the technical and social skills needed to work with wiki-technology, they’re pushed to collaborate and engage with Wikipedia’s social network, they are thrust into a thriving open-source movement, and they are exposed to a growing and increasingly relevant wiki-culture. Students experience all of this, while simultaneously learning course content.

That’s just the beginning.

As I teach my students about new media literacy, I often refer to new perspectives that I’ve been exposed to while working with the Wikimedia Foundation. Lessons about what it means to understand the nature of the evolving information source, how knowledge is generated through debate (some would go so far as to say that we’re working with a dialectic process here… perhaps an overstatement) and most importantly, how it is essential the we be critical of our information sources, no matter what they are or where we find them. You are not safe anywhere when it comes to information sources. There is bias everywhere. There are mistakes everywhere. No information source is the source. Research widely and research often. Be an informed consumer of information.

Wikipedia is so many things. It’s an encyclopedia, it’s a social network, and it’s also an idea. When I first began using Wikipedia in the classroom as a tool for innovative e-pedagogy, I quickly realized that not only was I teaching students new media literacy, not only would I be providing them with a unique opportunity to collaborate online and receive feedback from a multitude of individuals, forcing them to reflect on their work from a variety of perspectives. Not only would students be leaving something behind, contributing to the amount of information available online about their area of interest – have you heard about the Georgetown student’s Wikipedia article – National Democratic Party (Egypt) – that’s received more than 100,000 hits since the “paper” was turned in? Not bad for a term paper that would in years past end up in the file cabinet or the garbage, seemingly lost forever. When we introduce Wikipedia into the classroom as a teaching tool, not only do our students enjoy these benefits, we provide them with a space to reflect and learn about the nature of knowledge, how it is created, built, shaped, learned, and how it evolves. Taken a step further, perhaps we are also providing them with a place to question the normative ideals of participatory, direct democracy, and how our information sources contribute to our societal system of knowledge.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself. What is this Wikipedia project anyways? How does it work? Well, for more information, have a look at the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia Global Education Program outreach page. To put it simply, professors replace “traditional” writing assignments with the Wikipedia assignment, requiring students to research and write material that then gets placed in Wikipedia articles. At the same time that students conduct research and edit Wikipedia (learning the social and technical components of the site), students also learn about wiki-culture as they connect to Wikipedia’s social network. This all happens while professors simultaneously teach course content. It’s two-courses in one in many respects.

Clearly I’m gushing, clearly my views have changed, and for good reason. As an educator I’m being given a tremendous opportunity to offer my students something relevant, cutting-edge, intellectually challenging and fun. Oh and by the way, did I mention that it’s free?

Come check out what the Wikimedia Foundation has put together, I promise that you’ll never feel dirty about your Wikipedia use again.

-Jonathan Obar
Michigan State University