Most term papers have a limited audience. It’s you, your professor, and that’s pretty much it.
Maybe your mom, too, or anyone who passes it hanging on the fridge.
That is, unless the paper is for one of a growing number of professors who have students posting written material for a potential audience of millions. Professors have recently been assigning their students articles to write or edit on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can change.
The value of the website is more than gaining a wider audience. Professors and students involved say the website’s greatest value as a teaching tool is the feedback that the audience offers.
“It creates new knowledge instead of the paper getting thrown in a file cabinet and thrown away after seven years,” psychology associate professor Kent Norman said. “I have submitted articles to encyclopedias, but I am just one person. I’ve probably never written anything without a mistake; with Wikipedia, you can have 30 other experts editing your work.”
Norman decided to have his students write articles for Wikipedia in one undergraduate and one graduate class he taught last spring semester, in addition to the class he is teaching this semester.
The approach is not without its critics. Some question the wisdom of assigning students without the necessary expertise in the article’s topic to broadcast their work so widely. And the site has come under fire in general for inaccuracies and bias.
Still, students say they appreciate getting feedback on their work and say the wider audience acts as an incentive to make their work better.
Dipal Desai, a senior landscape architecture and psychology major, is taking Norman’s class, which has been broken up into six teams that will post articles relating to psychology on Wikipedia. Her team is writing an article on the hive mind, the psychological phenomenon of group collective thinking.
“It’s interesting to see my input on a global network,” she said. “Before this project, I wouldn’t have thought of editing an article, but it’s fun to go back and see who made comments and changed it.”
Norman cautioned that Wikipedia is not a reliable source to cite in a research paper because the content can change every day. But he said the site can be a helpful source of basic knowledge about a topic and can serve as a “jumpstation” to get more information.
Junior psychology major Luci Quinn, also attending Norman’s class, said that she likes the idea of helping others who would want to learn more about her group’s topic, concept learning, or the way people learn from humans and computers.
“It helps you dive deeper into a subject,” Quinn said, explaining that she feels compelled to hold articles published on Wikipedia to a higher standard than a paper that won’t see the light of day. “You have to really understand the material.”
“It’s a lot different from what we usually do,” junior psychology major Kameron Sheikh said of Norman’s class. “This is on a broader scale; you’re doing something everybody will read.”
Others question bringing Wikipedia into the classroom at all.
Anthony Colantuono, an associate professor in the archaeology and art history departments, said his faculty has voiced “deep concerns” about the quality of the articles on Wikipedia.
“Some authors are somebody who has had lifetime passion about a topic and has carefully gathered up the most commonplace knowledge,” he said. “But people don’t have the same resources to see if that information is accurate or not.”
Colantuono added that he wouldn’t assign any undergraduate students articles to post on the site because he felt that they would not have the resources or experience to write a page that would be completely accurate.
Norman is not the only professor to embrace the idea, though. The Spanish and Portuguese languages, literatures and cultures department has also been assigning students articles to post on Wikipedia, said Laura Quijano, a graduate teaching assistant in the department.
Quijano’s SPAN204: Spanish Grammar Review class last semester posted articles on aspects of Spanish culture. This semester, she is using Wikipedia’s discussion feature to interact online with her students in SPAN301: Advanced Grammar and Composition I.
“We are trying to keep up with new technology and incorporate it whenever possible into our teaching,” she said. “The technical aspect could be confusing but it’s been very helpful for the writing process.”
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