Ken Steele wrote:
My immediate reaction was that it could be a very difficult
quality-control job for you, Chris. One big issue will be the
specification of allowed source materials. The temptation for the
student will be to cut-and-paste from other websites and that could
lead to a bad case of GIGO (garbage in garbage out).
Thanks Ken, You may be right. Cutting-and-pasting would, of course, be
plagiarism, and I hhope my student will not do it. I will be emphasizing
that people rigorously reference what they write in order that
conflicting accounts might be sorted out. I don't expect the quality of
the writing to be at the level of, say, publishibility. But I am hoping
that having multiple people edit the same page will (1) lead people to
be a little more careful about what they write in the first place than
they might otherwise be (lest they get caught out by the next
contributor that comes along) and (2) when they aren't careful, the next
contributor that comes along will help to fix things. On the other hand,
it may just turn into a congeries of myth and error.
My second thought was to wonder how this was connected to the
classroom experience. Perhaps the entries could be general enough
(e.g., what is "research"?) so that a wiki entry could be discussed in
class in the light of new information and possible edits evaluated.
Good idea. (As well, most wikis have a discussion function, so that
various contributors can work out their differences of opinion on-line.)
Perhaps multiple editors should be working on any 1 entry at any
moment rather than 1 student adding a couple hundred words to 1 entry
each week. One interesting aspect of wikis is the give and take of
collaborative writing. This could be paired with classroom
discussion. A small group of editors has to distill/summarize and
evaluate the class discussion and then edit an entry to reflect the
consensus (or lack thereof).
Yes. The "assignment" aspect was mainly to ensure that every entry got
some work every week. Naturally, students will be free to contribute to
any entry any time they find out something interesting that they want to
contribute.
Good luck. Let us know how the project works out.
Thanks. Will do.
Regards,
Chris
=======================
Christopher D. Green wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
Sorry for the cross-posting, but I'm not sure where I'm going to get
the best advice.
Next year I'll be teaching a general graduate course in the history
of psychology (by general, I mean that it is taken by grad students
of various specializations, not just those in our History-Theory
program). The course is taken by about 20 student each year.
I want to incorporate a wiki into the course. Has anyone else done
this so far? My current idea is to assign every student to post a
sketch of about 1000 words on a particular historically-significant
figure in the first few weeks of class. This initial essay is to act
as a general framework with respect to that figure for other
contributors for the rest of the term. After those first 20-or-so
1000-word essays go up, in each succeeding week, every student will
be assigned a new figure, to whose essay the student will be expected
to add some new material (and edit previous contributions as needed).
Such additions, I expect, will be much shorter than the initial essay
-- perhaps 200 words each -- typically taking up one particular issue
in the figure's life and expanding on it in some detail. After
ten-or-so weeks of this, we should have a set of fairly
well-developed essays of about 3000 words each on about 20 of the
most significant figures in the history of psychology. (Naturally,
the essays need not focus solely on individuals. They could also be
about significant events and institutions: the history of the APA, of
IQ tests, of the use of rats in exptl psych, of the development of
psychopathological typology, etc. "Figure" was just a convenient term
to use here.)
I would like to hear comments and suggestions about this procedure
from you -- experts in teaching and in history -- and especially from
people who have actually used wikis in class before. Do you think
this kind of collaborative weekly assignment will work? What problems
should I expect? What should I look out for? How might I tweak it to
make it better?
Regards,
Chris
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, ON M3J 1P3
Canada
416-736-5115 ex. 66164
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.yorku.ca/christo
======================================
---------------------------------------------------------------
Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Boone, NC 28608
USA
---------------------------------------------------------------
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