Wikipedia:Training/For educators/Assignment prompts
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Wikipedia Training
Classroom
Assignment prompts
Looking for ideas for a reflective essay assignment prompt? Pick and choose some of these issues for students to explore.
- Reflective essay prompt
Write a short (2-5 page) reflective essay on your experiences using Wikipedia. Some of the questions you may choose to reflect upon include:
- The ways in which writing for Wikipedia is different from writing regular papers for class.
- What you learned about Wikipedia.
- This could be a reflection on the technical or social aspects of editing. This could include a discussion of:
- the Discussion page
- the History page
- the role of users
- the role of collaboration.
- Wikipedia's rules (which are slightly different than the rules of writing course papers)
- Has your relationship to Wikipedia changed?
- Do you see it differently?
- Do you trust it more or less?
- Did you learn new research methods in this course?
- Did you put methods you already knew to use?
- Was there more or less research involved for this Wikipedia entry then for your other writing assignments?
- Did working on Wikipedia, with its insistence on citing every source, make it easier or harder to insure that your writing was well researched?
- Will this assignment change the way you complete other writing, and if so, how?
- How do you feel knowing that the words you wrote are likely to be one of the very top search results for the person you were writing about?
- How do you feel knowing that these words could be modified or rewritten by the next person to come along (with the hope that they would be making them better)?
- (source)
- Wikipedia and knowledge production
Courses engaging with Wikipedia from a focused theoretical perspective in topics such as knowledge production, rhetoric, politics of access, or authorship, can also find questions appropriate for higher-level and graduate courses in the "Theories: Wikipedia and the production of knowledge" handbook, available as a .pdf for any course, and available in print for courses supported by the Wiki Education Foundation in the USA and Canada.
