Some renewed (2014) questions re using Appropedia in Higher-ed Service Learning from a 'newbie' perspective[edit source]

Thanks for this guide page guys. A really good informative beginning.

I've been chatting to Chriswaterguy about also using Appropedia as part of future courses, including transport policy and/or GIS (where e.g. students either profile some transport planning issues in-depth, and-or do a small 'action research' project involving researching a transport planning issue and suggesting improvements.

Some questions I'd have about this - and I think would be good to integrate into this page, or even to create a 'FAQ' spinoff, are:

  • In Assessment: How do you ensure that AP pages created by students are actually created by them?
    • I.E. for a single person project :- I guess Appropedia keeps a good edit history of every page - so you can, if needed, check who made what contributions. 2 scenarios I can see potential issues arising:
    • For single-student projects - I guess once could get the scenario of other Appropedia pages wanting to change the content while the assessment is still 'live'. Perhaps low-probability, but possible.
    • But are there any IT tools to assist in this? E.g. to give a report of how many lines of content contributed by each person (ideally in the current version, but also a summary of all revisions over time). I know for software version control using systems such as Subversion, there is the capability, as in the somewhat tongue-in-cheek subversion command svn blame.
    • And also :- perhaps one could put a disclaimer note at the top of the page - asking for normal Appropedia users to refrain from modifying the article until a certain date? (Though adding to the Talk page would be welcome). Is there any facility to auto-add such a disclaimer/note to the top of every Appro page in a certain sub-wiki?
    • The second scenario I see this issue as important would be in group assessment. IE for a larger project, you'd need to assign groups of 3-6 to take them on (doing group projects is quite popular in university anyway). Again how do you assess contribution of multiple students to a page? Perhaps you could even allow students to nominate different 'roles' in the project so some do more of the design/development anyway. Certainly this issue already exists in group projects using non-online writing media like MS Word, but I wonder if people handled differently on Appropedia anyway?
    • Or I guess a 3rd scenario - has anyone ever tried an assignment where students were required to _improve existing_ Wiki pages as part of a project? Probably this is quite challenging, but with good version control it would be feasible I guess - e.g. get them to archive a PDF copy of the page before they started, then discuss issues with the page, their research on how to improve them - the contributions they made as a result of their research, and then the final version as a result. Including how they handled discussions with others. This is probably a bit over-ambitious though, as it probably requires students to be quite strong in 'wiki culture', which takes a while to learn.
  • Re Copyright/IP:
    • How does the CC-by-sa license for Appropedia content (See Appropedia:Copyrights) interact with using it as part of formal pedagogical assessment? I guess the terms of that licence shouldn't be too problematic but its the sort of qtn I can imagine skeptical University research management staff asking before ok-ing a course ;) If there is no intention to re-publish the material in any form anyway then I don't see a big issue with this. I guess it is a matter of making students aware of this at the start of the course. And then perhaps to have in reserve, if students _really_ object to doing their work under this license - to allow them to present the work as a conventional PDF.

Also:- I suggest a Publications list at the bottom of this page might be beneficial - to relevant papers of using Appropedia directly, and perhaps others from broader Wiki community, like WikiSym.

Cheers - --PatSunter (talk) 23:25, 5 February 2014 (PST)

Tidying up[edit source]

I want to keep track of work done and to-do here.

I hope that classes/instructors will arrange these things ASAP:

  • Create class tags or make them standard (include categories in the code, "inprogress" in the name, and end date as a parameter).
  • Create class attribution templates, and

But most other tasks I can do with the bot:

Categories and templates to be processed:

Any other questions about the bot work, please ask on my bot's talk page: User talk:ChriswaterguyBot - you're also free to ask anything on my own talk page. --Chriswaterguy 17:45, 6 December 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Informative class names?[edit source]

Should there be a standard format for class names, e.g. mentioning which year or semester? If I see that a person or project is in "321 Chemistry" for example, I don't know whether that's a current or past class (or more likely unspecified).

How about 321 Chemistry Spring 2009, for example? Then that could be a subcategory of 321 Chemistry, which is a subcategory of "Smithville University". (Although using a season e.g. spring only makes sense when you know whether the class was in the northern or southern hemisphere, I can't think of another concise way of ]describing a class...)

To be fully informative it would need to be something like "Smithville University 321 Chemistry February-July 2009" for example, but I'm looking for more concise ways. Ideas? --Chriswaterguy 01:03, 10 December 2009 (UTC)Reply[reply]

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