FreePress Blog

Rather than the common approach in academia of putting down Wikipedia for not being a reliable source for students writing papers and reports, professor Martha Groom decided to turn that notion on its head by making fixing (or correcting) the Wikipedia article the actual assignment.

Not only does this creative approach directly address the complaints of inaccuracy by contributing to the system instead of ignoring it, it had an interesting side effect on the quality of the students’ work as well.

For her students, the Wikipedia experiment was “transformative,” and students’ writing online proved better than the average undergrad research paper.

Knowing their work was headed for the Web, not just one harried professor’s eyes, helped students reach higher - as did the standards set by the volunteer “Wikipedians” who police entries for accuracy and neutral tone, Groom said.

The exercise also gave students a taste of working in the real world of peer-reviewed research.

In other words, the students did better work than they otherwise would have, and they were helping out other people as well, by contributing their research and writing time, finding and citing sources, etc.

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while now, but I just haven’t found the time to blog lately. Sara’s post inspired me to comment on this, though, and to share a bit from my own experiences.

Overall, I think the walkouts are an appropriate way for the students to make their voices heard. Are there some who are just capitalizing on the opportunity to skip school, as I’ve heard all sorts of news media ramble on about for the last few days? Sure, but to suggest that this is the only motive for the actions of everyone in the group is (IMHO) wrong.

There are plenty of high school age “kids” who are qualified to have an opinion on this issue, whether or not you agree with them. I wonder if the same people would criticize a walkout on a different type of issue, such as protesting the distribution of condoms or the teaching of evolution as a fact? I suspect that walkouts on issues such as these would be looked at in a more positive light.

Now for the personal experience… When I first heard about this, I couldn’t help but think back on my high school days, in which I was part of a protest that involved leaving class during the first period after lunch and standing in the quad for the remainder of the day. Lots of people weren’t happy about it back then (including my parents, especially after they saw my picture in the paper the next day), but I still believe to this day it was the right thing to do.

I remember the same spin being put on it back then: “oh, these kids are just trying to get out of class”, etc. And I’m sure some of them were, although the fact that we were organized and stood in the quad instead of just leaving did help prove the sincerity of our motives a bit.

One really funny part that I remember was the attempts by the administration to quietly dismiss us. One of our demands was to have an intelligent debate with the people on the board / administration that had the power to change the policy. They attempted to appease us by suggesting that they instead arrange a meeting with us and the student council (ASB, or whatever they call it, you know the class president and all those people), who could then “represent our interests” in a discussion they would have with the board members, etc. We pointed out that these people could not represent us adequately in this situation, and turned down that option.

In the end, nothing changed, but I still felt it was a valuable expression. I did end up getting some Saturday detentions in the end, but even that wasn’t so bad, because I had a report due the next Monday which I probably wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t been forced to sit there at school.