Grants:TPS/Rburdette/ELI 2012: Difference between revisions
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===Workshop Presentation at ELI: "Engaging and Empowering the 21st-Century Student Using Wikipedia"===
ELI has accepted our proposal to present a 1/2-day conference workshop on "Engaging and Empowering the 21st-Century Student Using Wikipedia." We originally devised and presented this workshop for faculty, staff and graduate students at [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_State_University Louisiana State University] who are using Wikipedia in the classroom. It's context is rooted in the Campus Ambassador training developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and expands into specifics about teaching and learning with Wikipedia. It is targeted primarily at faculty with a focus on exploring lessons learned from LSU Wikipedia courses across the disciplines and applying those lessons to develop effective Wikipedia projects specific to your course.
We have offered this workshop in various formats on three different occasions at LSU. We have found it to be extremely effective in turning "interested" faculty into dedicated Wikipedia teaching fellows. The immersive approach to this training allows them to quickly master basic Wikipedia editing, understand Wikipedia culture and the pros and cons of using Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool, and allows time for designing their own assignments specific to their course.
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===About Us===
I am the Associate Director of [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSU_Communication_across_the_Curriculum LSU Communication across the Curriculum (CxC)], a program that works with LSU faculty in all disciplines to help LSU undergraduate students improve their written, oral, visual, and technological communication skills. In addition to managing the overall CxC program, my daily focus is on training faculty and supporting them in their efforts to employ communication-intensive teaching methods that help students learn and retain course content at a higher level, while also enabling the students to advance their communication skills.
I connected with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) in the Fall of 2010 because I was intrigued at the idea of using Wikipedia-based projects to enhance students writing skills. Our relationship with WMF developed very quickly and we hosted a Regional Campus Ambassador training at LSU in December 2012 in which the WMF trained 4 Campus Ambassadors for LSU 3 for other southern universities, 3 LSU professors. I worked with several dedicated faculty to integrated Wikipedia projects into 4 courses during Spring 2011 and then into 6 courses for Fall 2011, impacting a total of 200+ students. Our WP courses have spanned disciplines, including Landscape Architecture, Computer Science, Theatre, Geology, Sports Medicine, Biology, Architecture, and Political Communication. In working with these courses we have learned many lessons at LSU, but each has shown us a variety of ways in which learning of content and communication skills can be enhanced through the effective use of Wikipedia-based projects.
I consider myself to be well-versed in the pedagogy of Wikipedia, but admit that I am still a basic user and not a technical expert. For this reason, I recruited a highly-motivated undergraduate who willingly took on the task of becoming our "LSU Wikipedian", [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dylanstaley Dylan Staley]. Dylan not only became an advanced WP user, he was named as the Southern Regional Ambassador by the WMF. As explained above, the funds requested in this grant are to support Dylan's travel to co-present with me at ELI. He will be able to offer advanced guidance and support to some of the more tech-savvy faculty attending. In addition, our faculty have found it refreshing to hear from students on their perspective of Wikipedia and I expect the same to be true of the faculty Dylan will interact with at ELI.
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