Scholarship 2.0: An Idea Whose Time Has Come: <strong>Wikipedia Writing</strong>

I love the cartoon that begins this blog posting about working online. I like even more the idea of using Wikipedia for writing assignments. Several years ago the high school daughter of my partner was working on a paper for a school assignment (she attended a private girls school), and she was told Wikipedia could not be used as a source or reference.

While I do understand that one cannot testify for the validity or all the information in Wikipedia, given the inherent characteristics of wikis which allow anyone to edit any of the information entered, it still seems a waste of an incredible resource for teaching and learning in any subject area.

It strikes me using educational assignments like Wikipedia writing are a perfect example of a collaborative and active learning instructional strategy.

I’ve been teaching an instructional design course for the Master of Arts in Teaching with Internet Technologies program at the Marlboro College Graduate Center, and we are now more than half-way through the course. (how did that happen)?

I’ve not been overly pleased with how I have revised the course this term, as I feel that I overloaded the students with too much learning and instructional design theory, and was not as selective as would have been useful for students. I temporarily forgot the need for depth vs. coverage of material, and need to do a better job of this next time. It was too much theoretical material, and now that we are into instructional design models, and students are beginning to actually work with their final project, these more concrete aspects as making it much easier for students to grasp the material.

I have also been hammering on the need to reconcile a constructivist epistemology when working with the standard instructional design models, which dictate establishing goals and objectives for any given course. Certainly faculty need to establish this information, given that students have a right to expect that if they comply with course expectations of any given program, they will be able to know and behave in accordance with other professional in their chosen field of study upon graduation.

Heraclitus (below) is a philosopher who preceded Socrates and who is known for his doctrine of change being central to the universe.