Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Lilly Conference (better late than never)

To echo Lynda, I saw many great presentations at the Lilly conference, but here are the notes I took on a session entitled "Meeting the Millenials: Using Wikipedia to Teach 21st Century Literacy Skills to First-Year Writing Students"

46% of students 18 and over have used Wikipedia
More popular than m-w.com
Students like it because:
• it’s the first result in a Google search
• Multimedia
• Links within articles
Assignment:
Have students change article, to show how easy it is
Look at the Discussion Tab to see how articles are rated and read what’s being said about the article. People discuss things such as possible plagiarism of articles, order, etc. See BF Skinner for an example.

Students can also look at the History tab to see what has been changed and who changed it.

*Controversial articles are locked (Barack Obama, Scientology) and only admins can change them. Notice that there's no "Edit this article" tab. As an interesting and completely unrelated side note, while Scientology is locked, Presbyterianism and Friends are not.

Point: Say why it’s not good, don’t just tell them no.

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