Below is an excerpt from the article about a college student’s inquiry into Wikipedia and journalism in the digital age. What he found out might surprise some of you or even cause a reconsideration of using Wikipedia in the classroom. Read the full article here.
Here are some highlights (quoted here, not “lifted”)
Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote
DUBLIN -
When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote onWikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hoursafter the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets in an e-mail and the corrections began.
“The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn’t use information they find there if it can’t be traced back to a reliable primary source,” said the readers’ editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
Walsh said this was the first time to his knowledge that an academic researcher had placed false information on a Wikipedia listing specifically to test how the media would handle it.
How do you handle the use of Wikipedia in your courses and/or your own research?
David Albrecht, associate professor of Accounting and Management Information Systems, presented last week on “Why All Professors Should Blog.” He provided examples and led discussion about:
Why you should blog,
What you should blog about, and
How to get started.
A blog post he wrote a few months ago nicely summarizes his main arguments.
Now it’s your turn… if you have a blog and are a BGSU faculty member, leave your URL and name in the comments below. If you are thinking about a blog, what are you waiting for? As David mentioned, blogging “is like adding Miracle Grow to your research“!
The use of Wikipedia for class assignments or as a citation source has been an ongoing debate. Some professors accept the website’s use, usually after encouraging their students to caution what they take from the website. Other professors absolutely abhor the use of the website by their students. Robert E. Cummings says that he has found a new way to incorporate the use of Wikipedia into his classrooms and makes a strong case for using it in higher education, particularly as a writing tool.
According to Cummings, detractors of Wikipedia’s use in higher education assignments have reasons to be concerned. Wikipedia, indeed, is an open source where essentially anyone can edit or create information concerning almost any subject. With this in mind, people who use the website do expose themselves to getting inaccurate information or are subject to relying on information that is unfounded.
On the other hand, Cummings believes that Wikipedia offers several advantages for students. He believes the major advantage to helping student essay writing with the use of Wikipedia is that students have audiences that are real and can provide plenty of immediate feedback to their writing. In his classes Cummings literally has his students post their work to the website for people all over the Internet to provide them with comments concerning their work. More importantly for the students, Cummings believes that students are writing and having more exposure to having having to write formally. According to Cummings,
“Composition assignments in Wikipedia frame writing as a collaborative practice hosted within a network. This arrangement seems much more predictive of the environment our students will find themselves writing in after they leave the composition classroom, both in later college courses (as they collaborate across networks with fellow students in coursework) or in the workplace (as they collaborate with co-workers to prepare reports, proposals, or Web pages).”
We invite you to read Cummings’ article and see if what he has to say can be beneficial in any of your classes.
With all the encouragement to integrate active learning techniques into your teaching, it’s easy to get confused about what to use when. Specifically, deciding which technological tools to use can seem overwhelming. Three of the most common tools instructors use in their classes are blogs, wikis, and dicussion boards. To guide you in the process of choosing which tool to use, we have collected information and dveloped a chart.
It is important that you consider the answer to some important questions as you make your choice:
What is the purpose of using the tools?
What features are most important for you?
What level of privacy do you need?
The answers to these questions and others can be found by looking at the chart. Make sure to use the left-most colomn labeled “Topic” to guide your selection.
And don’t forget that you can always schedule a consultation at the Center for help on how to use your tool in class by calling the Center at 372-6898 or emailing the Center at ctl@bgsu.edu.
This presentation, “Disruptive Technologies or New Pedagogical Possibilities” by Grainne Conole was delivered at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2008, in London, England. In this video, Conole discusses how Web 2.0 has changing our learning and teaching paradigms. She discusses how we need to develop new models to understand the relationship between pedagogy and technology.
In order to understand the pedagogical implications of Web 2.0 tools, she explores three case studies: Learning Design, Openlearn and SocialLearn.
To read a related article by Grainne Conole please click here.
After watching this video, do you think we must develop new pedagogies that involve Web 2.0 tools?
The idea that a 60 minute lecture can be condensed into 60 seconds may sound absurd and even impossible, but there are some instructors in higher education who seem to think otherwise. The “Microlecture” is gathering followers across different disciplines in college teaching. Supporters of the one-minute lecture think that condensing a lesson strictly to key terms and ideas with less verbiage into a 60 second to three minute lecture has been beneficial for their students.
Naturally, the “microlecture” technique has its detractors. Critics of the practice think some topics, like literature or graphic design, are impossible to reduce down to three minutes. They also believe “microlectures” can at best provide “impressionistic overview.”
Although the microlecture is intended for online courses it could be applied in a traditional classroom setting. Instructions for how to make a microlecture in an online are listed below.
Here are the instructions provided for how to make a microlecture:
Professors spend a lot of time crafting hour-long lectures. The prospect of boiling them down to 60 seconds — or even five minutes — may seem daunting. David Penrose, a course designer for SunGard Higher Education who developed San Juan College’s microlectures, suggests that it can be done in five steps:
1. List the key concepts you are trying to convey in the 60-minute lecture. That series of phrases will form the core of your microlecture.
2. Write a 15 to 30-second introduction and conclusion. They will provide context for your key concepts.
3. Record these three elements using a microphone and Web camera. (The college information-technology department can provide advice and facilities.) If you want to produce an audio-only lecture, no Webcam is necessary. The finished product should be 60 seconds to three minutes long.
4. Design an assignment to follow the lecture that will direct students to readings or activities that allow them to explore the key concepts. Combined with a written assignment, that should allow students to learn the material.
5. Upload the video and assignment to your course-management software.
One of the leaders in online publishing is Scribd. Scribd allows people to upload documents – which can be in the form of reports, brochures, books, spreadsheets, puzzles and games, etc. – to the Internet for sharing with millions of readers. The website also allows you to discuss work that belongs to other people. And, Scribd is free for users!
As per Scribd’s FAQs:
Scribd lets you publish and discover documents online. It is like a big online library where anyone can upload. We make use of a custom Flash document viewer that lets you display documents right in your Web browser.
Part of the idea behind Scribd is that everyone has a lot of documents sitting around on their computers that only they can read. With Scribd we hope to unlock this information by putting it on the web.
Scribd would a useful website for students, especially, graduate students to get feedback on term papers, thesis or dissertation chapters, and for providing feedback to other users. For professors Scribd could prove helpful in publishing pre-publication documents for feedback or learning about what other college instructors are doing in their field or another field.
Over the past couple years Scribd has steadily grown in its users and readership. Please take a look for yourself and see what you can share or discuss.
The Center for Teaching and Learning is sponsoring 13 learning communities (LC) for the 2008-09 academic year. Below are brief updates from four of them, regarding their accomplishments and future plans.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning LC (Facilitated by Jackie Cuneen and Mark Earley) The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning LC read and discussed anthropologist Rebakah Nathan’s book My Freshman Year, an insider’s observation of modern college students focusing on the current state of academics and campus culture. In addition, we examined other materials such as a 60 Minutes feature entitled Here Come The Millennials, and interacted with invited guest Professor Michael Coomes from the Department of Higher Education and Student Affairs, an expert on the Millennial student and co-author of Serving the Millennial Generation. SoTL LC member Colleen Boff collected information from the group and created a LibGuide (see http://libguides.bgsu.edu/millennials) containing a comprehensive listing of scholarly sources about working with and teaching Millennials. The LibGuide features a menu of “Classroom Activities,” and LC members will add activities to the menu throughout Spring Semester 2009. The SoTL LC will demonstrate the LibGuide at the CTL’s Teaching and Learning Fair on February 6, 2009 (watch CTL’s website for more information on this event).
Publication LC (Facilitated by Allie Terry) The Publication LC has met 4 times to discuss 6 Learning Community members’ research thus far and has already built a “culture of accountability” for the publication process within the group. Each session, at least one LC member pre-circulates a publication in progress for critique and discussion by the group. During our meeting, we dissect the text, move it forward in terms of readers’ comments, conceptual frameworks, and issues of style.
The culture of mutual trust and respect in the group provides an ideal environment of “safe critique,” one in which the shared goal is to publish the research in the best form possible. Thus, the author understands that the critique is not aimed at intellectual failure, but rather at intellectual achievement in the eventual publication of the research. Our LC’s current works-in-progress include: 21 articles, 7 book chapters, at least 4 book manuscripts, 2 grant proposals, and 16 conference papers. (Note: this LC has 10 members this year.)
Library e-Tools LC (Facilitated by Colleen Boff and Linda Rich) The Library e-Tools LC has been having fun digging into EBSCOhost, a common search interface to dozens of library research databases covering a variety of topics and disciplines. Here’s what we are in the process of exploring:
Basic and advanced searching
Customization of the search screen
Saving searches and organizing research into folders
Sharing research folders with other users (e.g. students, colleagues, etc.)
Setting up automatic searches via email alerts/RSS feeds
Setting up table of contents alerts for favorite journals
Using EBSCOhosts’ Page Composer to easily build web pages
As we explore these different Web 2.0 enhancements, we discuss ways to use these value-added features with students in our teaching and for our own research and work with colleagues.
Pedagogy and Scholarship in Second Life Learning Community (facilitated by Anthony Fontana and Bonnie Mitchell) has been investigating various approaches to integrating SL into the BGSU learning environment and the issues involved. Members continually share their experiences, concerns, opinions, expertise and interests during group discussions and interactive dialog. The community consists of members from a variety of disciplines including Art, Interpersonal Communication, Intervention Services, the Writing Center, Computer Science, Psychology and Pop Culture.
The facilitators have shared the knowledge that they obtained while attending the Second Life Educators Community Conference in Florida and the Internet Research Conference in Denmark. As a group, the Pedagogy and Scholarship in Second Life Learning Community discussed issues related to research ethics and procedures, relevant and popular research topics in SL, and developments in virtual world technologies. Other meetings have focused primarily on teaching using Second Life and teaching experiences on the virtual campus.
For more information about these and other learning communities, visit the CTL’s LC page or contact us at ctl@bgsu.edu or 372-6898.
There is a small handful of education professionals who are joining a movement towards creating an online university. The fact that there will be an online university should not serve as too much of a surprise though, because of how common we hear about attaining a college degree online or because online courses are almost as common. However, this online university is quite different.
As Jeffrey Young reports on The Chronicle of Education website, the P2P University (peer-to-peer) will involve instructors from around the world volunteering and helping pay the Web-hosting fees to publish the ‘university’s’ courses. P2P University is seeking to help students take part in “learning from one another through online social tools.” Among other reasons explaining why this school is being founded is because P2P University wants to fill in what they see as gaps in traditional university online classes.
The idea of a peer-to-peer online school is not an entirely new concept, and it has been attempted before. Most tries have been met with failure, but P2P says that it has plans that say should ensure its survival. One of the strategies to attract students is by having internationally renowned instructors, who are retired or working in fields outside of Academia.
There has been no mention of actual official credit for students ‘attending’ P2P and details are still being worked out to establish the school. Please read Young’s article and see what you think about this idea of peer-to-peer higher education.
It was less than a decade ago that students had to actually get in line at the registrars office at a prescribed time and date in order to add or drop a course. It was even less than a decade ago that note-taking usually meant writing by hand in a notebook. Today, as evident here at BGSU, students can enroll for classes completely online and/or type (even digitally record) their notes on their laptop.
The rapid shifts in technology have now reached the point where we could likely see Blue Books become obsolete. Some universities are purchasing certain software programs that students can install onto their laptops which allows writing exams to be typed in class. The programs essentially allow students to open the word processing programs on their laptops, while locking down all other programs. The programs can also do a number of other options, which add to the program’s attractiveness.
Securexam is one of the forerunners in this shift in higher education. Please read an article on Insidehighered.com to learn more about the possible obsolescence of the Blue Book tradition at universities.
Promote an institution-wide dialogue among faculty, staff and graduate students with an interest in teaching and learning - with or without technology.
Welcome to
INTERACT AT THE CENTER!
The Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) @ BGSU looks forward to your engaging comments on issues related to teaching and learning.
If you would like to be a part of the "Interact Community," simply click on the ADD COMMENT link at the bottom of a posting and share your thoughts, experiences, or both.
If you have any suggestions for future discussions, please email ctl@bgsu.edu
David Albrecht, associate professor of Accounting and Management Information Systems, presented last week on “Why All Professors Should Blog.” He provided examples and led discussion about: 
