Archive:Eduzendium

Eduzendium press release - January 24, 2008

Eduzendium is a program in which the Citizendium partners with university programs throughout the world to create high-quality, English language entries for the Citizendium. Dr. Sorin Adam Matei, Associate Professor at Purdue University, is Academic Content Coordinator for the program. He works with and collaborates in making decisions with a small group of interested "Citizens" (Citizendium members), in a sort of Eduzendium task-force. Dr. Lee Berger, in particular, has taken the lead in giving advice to new instructors who have decided to use the Citizendium in their course work.

Note that eduzendium.org redirects to this page!

What does Eduzendium do?

The Citizendium invites university instructors to include the crafting of a Citizendium article as an assignment.

Our project is open for collaborative educational and knowledge generation initiatives with higher education institutions. We strongly believe in the necessity of inviting experts of all kinds to help us build our repository of knowledge.

A distinct approach in this context is our policy of inviting the professors that teach and the students enrolled in advanced courses of the foundational/"fundamentals of" sort to help us seed or build up our entries with high-quality, clearly-argued and -written content. A pilot program involved major universities in the United States and abroad in late 2007, with good success. We hope the program will extend throughout universities in the English-speaking world.

Philosophically, we believe that the individuals who struggle with the meaning of fundamental concepts on a daily basis make excellent authors and editors for entries on those concepts. Advanced foundational courses are an ideal site for recruiting such authors and editors because their primary goal is to redefine and communicate for each generation the meaning of the basic and essential issues of our knowledge world. Furthermore, the activity of these seminars is often directed at producing short and insightful papers about some basic concepts which might or might not be later transformed into more "formal" publications. We believe that opening up the Citizendium to collaborative work on specific topic to students and their professors offers them the opportunity to take their work to another, more socially consequential level, which enhances the educational process on the one hand, while helping the Citizendium to build its socially involved and expert friendly knowledge environment, on the other hand.

In brief, we encourage faculty to use the Citizendium as a platform for their students to write public entries about key terms pertaining to a number of disciplines.

The collaborative process

In inviting the academic community to join us we are aware that we will be successful only to the degree we offer educators and students the opportunity to do what they ought to be doing: impart knowledge in an efficient way, with the added excitement, feedback, real life rewards of being part of the Citizendium. We are aware that the primary goal of the education process in academia is to transmit useful knowledge and to train students for success. The Eduzendium program is designed to be extremely flexible and adaptable to the needs of each professor and seminar member. It includes an array of possible collaborative arrangements and the actual editorial process will be shaped according to each seminar's policies.

A very simple and direct collaboration would be where the professor would takes the students to sign up on the Citizendium and perform a certain amount of work or to intiate and actively collaborate on a specific entry. In other situations the professors can charge specific students to write specific entries, which can be evaluated and edited for content and style individually. Editorial changes can be operated by the professor, by a team designated by the professor or by his or her entire class. This can be done using our wiki platform, in which case the topic can be reserved and closed to public access for a limited period of time. (You must ask, however, and make your intentions very clear.) Professors and their students can obtain access to a specific namespace or wiki page, which will be editable and even readable only by them for a period of time (typically, until the assignments are finished). Conceivably, some seminar might decide to work on their topics completely outside the Citizendium technological flow and only provide the Citizendium with the best of their finished products; that would be fine as well.

In a different scenario, the professor can assign the topics to the entire class, asking the members to work on them simultaneously and edit them during a period of time. He or she can intervene in the editorial process when and if needed. This, again, can be done inside or outside of the Citizendium process.

Finally, instructors can decide to work collaboratively on an existing topic in the public view and to assess the fruits of the collaboration through individual student reflection papers.

In those scenarios in which the class works outside the Citizendium process, or within a closed Citizendium environment (such as an ad hoc namespace), the professor or the class can look over the final product and decide if they would like to vet the product and make it into an "approved" Citizendium article. The instructor can then propose the topic to the Citizendium editors for introduction in the editorial flow. Note that it will always be possible to link to a specific version of an article, even after it has been edited. Note that professors need not approve articles; some may not be approvable.

While Citizendium management gives a wide latitude to Eduzendium participants for purposes of choosing topics, professors may be asked not to choose articles that are currently undergoing active editing by Citizendium contributors. This should still permit very wide latitude of topic choice. Indeed, many course topics may not have any articles written at all. (We would love for you to get us started!)

In essence, the Eduzendium program fosters real life conditions for collaborative intellectual projects within the participating seminars, which can result in a diversity of team (group) or individual projects. Instructors and students can get complete control over the degree and nature of the editorial process. Specifically, they can decide the nature of the assignments and the degree to which they will be completed in collaboration with other students or with the Citizendium community, the amount of work allocated to contributing Citizendium, the nature of the rewards and penalties to be used in assessing student work, and the quality standards of this work. Finally, they can decide if, how much and when their work can be officially published on Citizendium.

Operational details

Operationally, we now invite university instructors, particularly teaching graduate and upper-division courses, to register with Eduzendium. Then:

• If they prefer to assign paper that will be incorporated in Eduzendium at the end of the education process, we will suggest the professor to do a quick survey of Citizendium articles and to submit a list of possible topics that are not actively developed by the Citizendium. At the end of the paper and grading process, students papers will be submitted to the Citizendium in an electronic format, either by direct posting by the student or by the professors, or by the Eduzendium coordinators.

• In the scenario in which professors would like to assign their students to collaborative among themselves on the Citizendium, they and their students will have to register with Citizendium and if necessary will be assigned specific user rights for a namespace or page. Then, the professors and their students propose a number of entries that they would like to write on. Again, as a broad strategic option they will be asked to choose new or undeveloped topics.

• In case the professors and the students prefer to work with the Citizendium community and do not mind being in the public eye during the editing process, they can also work on existing topics. The Academic Content Coordinator, Dr. Sorin Adam Matei, his graduate students enrolled in Citizendium, and the Eduzendium task-group members such as Dr. Lee Berger, can help the academic partners with training in using the medium, especially with respect to editing wiki pages and with staying within the the editorial policies undergirding Citizendium. During the training process it will be stressed that topics need to be neutral in tone, consistent, well-written, factually accurate, family-friendly, and should not include original research. Please do let us know if you need such training. No one has opted to use it yet, but we are willing.

What are the educational benefits?

Writing a high-quality encyclopedia article about a specific topic requires, and trains, a specific sort of effort or discipline. Simply producing a suitably informative, but neutral, definition of a concept can require a great deal of thought. Crafting a jumble of facts into a coherent narrative, which the Citizendium requires, is a difficult, but rewarding and educational task. Furthermore, it practices a very useful scholarly skill to investigate and decide on what the most reliable bibliography items for an article are.

The educational benefits are plain if a student writes a general, neutral encyclopedia article on a topic, in addition to an opinionated paper about some special aspect of the topic.

How to register

If you are a professor and you would like to register your course in the Eduzendium program, please send mail to Dr. Sorin Matei, smatei@purdue.edu, and Dr. Lee Berger, Lee.berger@wits.ac.za, with information about yourself and your course. In the process of getting you set up, we will encourage you to add your course to the list below and can help you choose a list of topics that your course will (temporarily) manage. Our project is still small enough that it makes sense for topics can be chosen "on the fly" as well--for instance, students may suggest topics. We do encourage you, however, to choose topics that are within the reasonable competence of your students. As a rule of thumb, most of the articles your class produces should be serviceable and improveable--not simply in need of replacement. Upper division and graduate courses often fit the bill. "Freshman English," just for example, probably won't.

Recruitment for Eduzendium

See Eduzendium Recruitment.

Seminars that collaborate(d) with EDUZENDIUM

Fall 2007

Purdue University

• COM 632 Online Interaction, Fall 2007, instructor Dr. Sorin Adam Matei

East Carolina University

• EDTC 6020 Principles of Instructional Design, Fall 2007, instructor Dr. Ross A. Perkins

University of the Witwatersrand

• Graduate course about paleoanthropology, Fall 2007, instructor Dr. Lee R. Berger

West Virginia University

• Nonprofit Management and the Third Sector, Fall semester. Instructor Dr. Roger Lohmann

Winter/Spring 2008

University of Colorado

• Anthro 4110 Human Evolutionary Biology - Spring 2008. instructor Dr. Matt Sponheimer

Temple University

• Finance - Spring 2008. Instructor Daniel Folkinshteyn

Queens College

• Microbiology 201 - Spring 2008 Dr. John Dennehy

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