Dr. Craig Roberts (Visiting Instructor, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences) says
I’m always looking for new ways to enable students to express their ideas. I also find the students benefit from interacting with the world outside the classroom. Wikipedia is enabling us to do both.
The students in his Neurobiology of Learning and Memory course worked in teams to create a Wikipedia entry about a topic from the class.
Check out their pages on topics related to learning:
Dr. Roberts is proud to point out that in a Google search for most of these topics, the student-created pages are one of the top results. He felt that the students went well beyond the requirements of the assignment, both in length and quality. For some of these topics, the pages have been critiqued by people working in the field. (From an article page in Wikipedia, you can click on “Discussion” or “View history” to see interactions with the topics).
Dr. Roberts feels the project was very successful:
As an instructional tool, Wikipedia is enabling us to synthesize ideas from the classroom and create an open discussion with the millions of people visiting the site each day.
He credits CIT’s Hugh Crumley with helping to expand his ideas about how students can learn in the classroom.
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Resources for faculty interested in teaching with Wikipedia: