Archive:Eduzendium
What is Eduzendium?
Eduzendium is a Citizendium program of partnering with high profile doctoral programs and seminars throughout the world to create high-quality, English language entries for Citizendium. Its coordinator is Dr. Sorin Adam Matei, the Academic Content Coordinator, Associate Professor at Purdue University.
What does Eduzendium do?
Citizendium is open for collaborative educational and knowledge generation initiatives with higher education institutions. Ours is an expert-friendly environment and 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 foundational/"fundamentals of" doctoral and masters seminars at major "research one" universities to help us seed or build up our entries with high quality, clearly argued and written content.
Philosophically, we believe that the best authors and editors for fundamental concept-entries are the individuals who struggle with their meaning on a daily basis. Foundational seminars 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 this 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 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 one the one hand, and which helps Citizendium build up with claim of a socially involved and expert friendly knowledge environment.
More specifically, we work closely with selected faculty and graduate students from a number of foundational seminars at several high profile Universities in writing entries for key terms pertaining to a number of disciplines.
The collaborative process
The process is closely connected with the educational process taking place in each seminar. Its goal is to create real life conditions for collaborative intellectual projects within the seminar, which can result in team (group) projects centered around specific topics. The instructors have complete control over the degree and nature of their involvement. Specifically, they can decide the amount of work allocated to contributing the entries to Wikipedia, the nature of the rewards and penalties to be used in assessing their students work on Citizendium, and the quality standards of this work. The instructors and their students have privileged access to specific pages during the semester and they can decide if a final product can be vetted and released for public consumption or not.
In terms of operational steps, the collaboration starts with registering the professors and their students on Citizendium. This does not require any specific vetting process. Then, the professors and their students propose a number of entries that they would like to write on. These can be existing or newly created entries. With assistance from Citizendium members, especially the Academic Content Coordinator, Dr. Sorin Adam Matei and his graduate students at Citizendium, the academic partners are trained in using the medium and are shown how to edit wiki pages. For a period of time, typically a semester, but also less, depending on the work cycles at each seminar, the topic pages are editable only by the members of the seminar. Citizendium will ensure, using appropriate user rights safeguards, that only specific users are allowed to edit the chosen pages for the specified period of time. This exception aside, the rules of the editorial process need to be in compliance with the general policies undergirding Citizendium. This means among other things that the topics need to be neutral in tone, consistent, well written, factually accurate, family-friendly and should not include original research.
The actual editorial process will be shaped according to each seminar policies. In certain 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.
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.
At the end of the allocated period of time 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. In this situation, the ultimate vetting right is given to the professor who is also an editor.
The articles can then be offered for further editing to the public, the professor or one or more of his graduate students becoming the official "editors" of that topic. To reduce the burden of responsibility that comes with this continued involvement Citizendium has provided for a disciplinary "rolling" editorship. That is, a group of entries in a specific disciplinary areas (sociology, communication, astronomy, etc.) are given under temporary editorship to a specific seminar team. When their period of involvement is ended, editorship can be passed on to a different seminar, at the same or another institution. We hope, however, that a sufficient number of individuals involved in such initiatives will be fascinated enough by the idea to want to be involved in the project for extensive periods of time.