Wikipedia in university courses: teaching practices and educational benefits (original) (raw)
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The Elephant in the Room: A Place for Wikipedia in Higher Education?
The article departs from a pilot survey among Norwegian teacher students that maps their usage, skills and attitudes in relation to the web based encyclopedia Wikipedia. The survey shows that the students are heavy users of Wikipedia content yet show a low level of knowledge as to how content is constructed or the ways in which Wikipedia differs from traditional, paper-based encyclopedias. The students also express little interest in parttaking in creating content or maintaining the site. The second part of the article argues that a way to remedy both lack of knowledge and interest among students is to bring Wikipedia actively into the classrooms and enable students to take part in creating and maintaining Wikipedia content. This way, Wikipedia may serve as an effective tool with which to address and enhance a range of central 21st century skills.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2016
This paper explores the current perception of Wikipedia in academia, focusing on both the reasons for its unpopularity among some, and the reasons for its growing acceptance among others. First, the reasons that Wikipedia is still struggling to gain acceptance among many academics and higher education professionals are identified. These include common misconceptions about Wikipedia, doubts about its quality; uneasiness with the challenge it poses to the traditional peer review system; and a lack of career-enhancing motivations related to using Wikipedia. Second, the benefits of teaching with Wikipedia for educators, students and the wider society, as discussed in the current teaching literature, are explored. Finally, the paper presents an argument for using Wikipedia in a variety of ways to help students develop critical and academic writing skills.
Wikipedia works and we do not understand how it is possible. If it does, it is thanks to the ants’ nest-like “functional anarchy” of the users who daily correct, contribute, and check its articles. This work focuses on the possible interactions of the triangle students–teacher–Wikipedia, considering that until now the academic world has had mixed feelings towards Wikipedia. From a theoretical point of view, a list of possible means of contribution to Wikipedia by university-level students with real-life examples is given. These include -and are not limited to- writing new articles, proof-reading existing ones, translating from one language version to another, creating audio-visual content, and drawing info-graphics. For a more empirical approach, a project was carried out at Ca’ Foscari University (Venice, Italy), with two cohorts of students who were given the possibility of choosing to contribute to Wikipedia as part of one of their exams. To offer a complete overview, this work deals both with the problems encountered during the preparation and the execution of the activity, as well as the general results.
Wikipedia and the University, a case study
Teaching in Higher Education, 2012
This article discusses the use of Wikipedia by academics and students for learning and teaching activities at Liverpool Hope University. Hope has distinctive aspects but we consider the findings to be indicative of Wikipedia use at other British universities. First we discuss general issues of Wikipedia use within the university. Second, we examine existing research on Wikipedia use amongst students and academics. Based upon a sample of 133 academics and 1222 students, our princi- pal findings were: (1) 75% of academics and students use Wikipedia; (2) student use is typically confined to the initial stages of assessments; (3) a quarter of academics provide guidance on how to use Wikipedia and (4) 70% of academics use Wikipedia for background information for teaching purposes, something that it is not influenced by whether student use is tolerated or not. Our conclusion is that whilst Wikipedia is now unofficially integrated into universities, it is not ‘the’ information resource as feared by many and that an enlightened minority of academics have attempted to assimilate it into their teaching.
Wikipedia in higher education: Changes in perceived value through content contribution
Comunicar, 2018
Wikipedia is a widely used resource by university students, but it is not necessarily regarded as being reliable and trustworthy by them, nor is it seen as a context in which to make content contributions. This paper presents a teaching and research project that consisted in having students edit or create Wikipedia articles and testing whether or not this experience changed their perceived value of the platform. We conducted our experience at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and University of Niš (Niš, Serbia) with a total number of 240 students. These students edited articles and answered two questionnaires, one before and one after the exercise. We compared the pre and post experience answers to the questionnaires with a series of paired samples t-tests, through which our data showed that students did significantly change their perception of reliability and usefulness, and of likeliness of finding false information on Wikipedia. Their appreciation of the task of writing Wikipedia articles, in terms of it being interesting and challenge also increased. They did not significantly change, however, their judgement on the social value of the platform, neither in the university nor in the general context. In addition, the open questions and informal feedback allowed us to gather valuable insights towards the evaluation of the overall experience.
Contributing to Wikipedia as an assignment for undergraduate students
Wikis are widely used in teaching to engage students in active learning and create learning resources in form of learner generated content. Usually classes or courses create their private wiki, which students fill with content created in the context of the course. At TU Berlin we had about 120 students of the course “Introduction to Media Informatics” create public domain content on the official Wikipedia. Contributing to Wikipedia was one of 13 homework assignments, which were rewarded with bonus points for the written exam. Tasks were: correcting errors or adding missing sources to existing articles as well as creating new content like images or text paragraphs. The students were free to contribute content on any topic as long as it was somehow related to the field of Media Informatics Before the assignment was given out at the start of the semester, students were surveyed on how much they use and trust Wikipedia as well as how confident they perceived themselves to contribute to Wikipedia. The main finding was that students are not very confident in their ability to create valuable content on Wikipedia. The students also reported that they found the assignment too work intensive and did not know where to start. Despite the possibility to earn bonus points for their final grade, only about 20% of the students handed in the Wikipedia assignment. All in all, the assignment was not very popular among students and did not yield the expected engagement. From that experience we conclude that the tasks were too open and unspecific. While students were interested in contributing to Wikipedia, much more guidance should have been provided on how and what to contribute.
Efficacy of Wikipedia as a pedagogical apparatus in the classroom
2013
The profusion of the information and communication technology has allowed institution of higher education educators and users to experiment variety of apparatus accessible that can be employed as instructive devices in the classrooms. Wikipedia personifies a fascinating and novel concept which can be used to engage students in authentic collaborative writing activities. This paper provides a description of how Wikipedia was incorporated as a pedagogical means in the ESL settings and reports on the students’ attitude and perception on the use of Wikipedia to enhance their L2 proficiency specifically their writing skills. The experience involved the use of wiki technology and the advanced collaborative forms and participative assessment as part of the teaching method. Data was gathered through a survey questionnaire concerning a particular group of transfer students at the tertiary stage. By the means of intended framework and structure, the students carried out several stages of the ...
Students’ Attitudes Towards the Use of Wikipedia: A Teaching Tool and a Way to Modernize Teaching
Área abierta, 2021
This paper presents a research on students' attitudes towards the use of Wikipedia in teaching. The sample was comprised of students from the Pedagogical Faculty in Vranje, a higher education institution affiliated with the University of Niš, Serbia. Students were assigned to write articles on Wikipedia as an alternative to writing their standard term papers; this way the Wikipedia content became significantly enriched, positively evaluating the website as a teaching tool in the process. The results confirmed that students preferred creating articles on Wikipedia to writing standard term papers. Those results may contribute significantly to further improvement and modernization of university teaching.