Students Assigned to Write Wikipedia Articles

openfrog writes "An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven "transformative" to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a "peer reviewed" environment, which enhanced the quality of their output."

Comments

Re:Deleted!

[JustShootMe]

...and the person who puts it up for speedy deletion contacts all of his/her friends and has them vote on it, the article gets deleted, and some college student just learned what all his or her hard work is really worth to wikipedia admins.

Don't get me wrong, it is indeed a valuable life lesson. Just one I wish didn't need to be taught.

Re:Doublt benefit..

[moderatorrater]

When people who aren't admins act like trolls, push their POVs over everyone else, and refuse to even debate the issue with others without engaging in massive revert-wars, they generally get banned Fixed that for you.

Re:Another milepost on the way to irrelevance

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah grasshopper, I am so glad to see you are becoming familiar with some elementary English lexicon. Ooo, "slippery slope" and "straw man" (can you find the Wikipedia article for that also?!). Now try a new exercise - try to think a little on your own! I think you can do it. Then, perhaps, you might consider responding with something which is, in fact, interesting, rather than merely pleasing to your prepubescent fans on /. (another example of an online forum being increasingly diluted by mediocrity, as your post illustrates).

Or if you'd simply like to have a dictionary lookup debate, maybe look up the work "ochlocracy" sometime.