Open Educational Practices/Wikis

This lesson introduces creating and editing open educational resources using wikis.

Objectives and Skills

Objectives and skills for this lesson include:

• Edit and create open content

Readings

1. Wikipedia: Wikipedia:Education program
2. Wikibooks: Using Wikibooks/Class Project Guidelines
3. Wikiversity: Wikiversity teachers

Multimedia

1. YouTube: Wikipedia in Education 1 of 12 Why do you teach Wikipedia?
2. YouTube: Wikipedia in Education 4 of 12 Assignments
3. YouTube: Wikipedia in Education 8 of 12 Work with the Wikipedia community
4. YouTube: Wikipedia Book Creator
5. YouTube: Wikibooks Overview

Activities

1. Edit and create open content.
   • Select a Wikipedia article, Wikibooks chapter, or Wikiversity lesson for something in which you are a content expert. Review the article, chapter, or lesson and identify opportunities for improvement.
   • Review the resource's talk page and edit history to understand current context and any open issues related to the resource.
   • Review Wikipedia:Wikipedia:VisualEditor. Enable visual editing on your selected platform (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, or Wikiversity) before continuing. On Wikiversity, the options to enable visual editing are at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures.
   • Enhance the wiki resource, being careful to include references for any added content. If appropriate, engage in discussion on the resource’s Talk: page regarding any open issues which you are comfortable in addressing.
   • Access the Piazza web service at Piazza: Open Educational Practices to join the course discussion forums and review existing posts. Create a new post or respond to existing posts to address one or more of the following questions:
     • Which platform and resource did you choose to edit, and why? What enhancements did you make?
     • What difficulties did you encounter in editing wiki content? Were your contributions accepted or were they rejected?
     • Did you engage in discussion with other wiki editors on-wiki? Were your discussions productive?
     • What concerns do you have in using wikis for student assignments? How might these concerns be addressed?
2. Edit this page.

   

   • Review Wikiversity:Be bold. Wikis only work if people are bold.
   • Review your notes of new concepts or key terms from this lesson and compare them to the Lesson Summary and Key Terms listed below.
   • Be bold by improving this course wiki page using the Edit tab. For the Lesson Summary and Key Terms, include references for any content you add. If the Lesson Summary and Key Terms sections seem complete to you, review the Readings and Multimedia links for opportunities for improvement. But note, improving a wiki does not always mean adding to the wiki. Consider how much content you, yourself, are willing to view. Add, edit, update, delete, replace with links to better resources, etc. Your guide should always be to leave the wiki better than you found it.
3. Reflect on open educational practices.
   • Reflect on what you learned in this introduction to creating and editing open educational resources using wikis. What surprised you? What have you learned so far that you can apply to your own learning environment(s)? Post your reflection in the Piazza discussion forum, sharing it with either the entire class or one or more of the available discussion groups.
   • Review other reflection posts and respond to at least two that interest you. Post any questions you have that you would like others to address.

Lesson Summary

Additional items will be contributed by course participants

• Participants will edit and create open content within areas - Wikipedia article, Wikibooks chapter, or Wikiversity lessons - where they are content experts.
  1. Wikipedia welcomes student editors through the Wikipedia Education Program and offers instructor training through the Wiki Education Dashboard.
  2. Wikibooks welcomes group collaborative projects writing textbooks and manuals. It also allows readers to participate in a discussion feature.
  3. Wikiversity is a learning environment where both teachers and students can simultaneously contribute to knowledge creation. It welcomes learning projects and communities around existing and new materials.
• A note about interaction between these areas: Wikibooks can be created based on pages found on Wikipedia that the user has chosen to include in the book. Once the book is created, its "content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgement of the work used is included."

Key Terms

Additional items will be contributed by course participants

citation

A citation is a reference to a published or unpublished source and is used to to uphold intellectual honesty (or avoiding plagiarism).

citation needed

The tag [citation needed] is used by Wikipedia editors to request verification of claims on the cite. This is a strategy to increase the reliability of the resource.

copyright

is a form of intellectual property that grants the creator of an original creative work an exclusive legal right to determine whether and under what conditions this original work may be copied and used by others.

five pillars

The fundamental principles of Wikipedia may be summarized in five "pillars".

wiki

A knowledge base website on which users collaboratively modify content and structure directly from the web browser, where text is typically written using a simplified markup language and often edited with the help of a rich-text editor.

Wikipedia

Is an open online encyclopedia that relies on open collaboration.

Wikiversity

Is a site for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.

See Also

• WikiEdu: Dashboard

References

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