In my comp classes, I have my students writing Wikipedia pages as part of their multi-genre project. They have to find something that isn't on there already and learn all of the conventions & formatting rules. As it turns out, this has also been a fun little learning project for me. To teach it, I obviously had to learn it & be able to demonstrate it... something I didn't really think about in December when I came up w/ the assignment. In trying to figure all of it out, I've come to a 2-fold realization:1) It's a pretty fun site
2) I'm loving tweaking stuff & I've made a bunch of changes
* I cleaned up & expanded the Depot Town page .
* I added "The Mexican Slayride" to the Boilermaker page .
* I placed a picture of Isaiah in the Yawn page... mainly because I needed to learn how to add a picture & that's the 1 I had on my office desk-top .
* I created a page for the Michigan Elvisfest... it's still pretty brief, but it's a start & I've got about a week to double its size since I want my class to create pages about twice as long for their assignment.
Along w/ writing the page, they've been discussing the problems w/ the site & it seems that if more students looked into it like this, there'd be far fewer of them who see it as a legitimate source for research projects. The other new project I've got them doing this semester is blogging... if you're interested, there are links to all of their blogs on my class blog.
4 comments:
Someone named Cmadler, from Wikipedia, sent me a message, but I didn't know how to respond (I'll have to figure that out this weekend) so I'm going to do it here and hope he or she reads this again.
You're absolutely right about encyclopedias and we did discuss that in class. The difference is that since they prefer to go straight to the internet and rarely to an actual book, the wikipedia issue was more pressing.
PS I dig all the new-grass stuff you've done.
Great assignment Andre! Funny about not realizing you would have to do it, but it sounds like it worked out better that way! I've never really spent much time on it. I'll have to check it out myself. If I do the assignment, will you grade it? hehe
So.... can I heckle your students a bit?
I mean, of course I can... but will you be checking on their comments so that I'll know what impact I'm having? :)
Some of them seem rather delicate, narrow-minded flowers... is it time for them to go swimming in the "real" internet where there are cranks, weirdos, and people who will challenge them?
Of course you can give them shit... why do you think I posted the link?
Post a Comment