Appropedia works closely with classes at several universities, so that students help to create a knowledge bank for a rich and sustainable world as part of their course, and are inspired to learn and contribute. Appropedia has been shown to be a particularly useful tool for educators to provide service learning.[1]

Our program
Appropedia has a number of university classes in North America using the wiki as a platform for service learning. Programs include written research reports, writing up field projects, and translating pages. See also Category:Service_Learning and Portal:Service learning.
So far
This has received very good feedback from instructors and students. It's a boost to motivation, it showcases the class's work, and contributes to a global body of knowledge to solutions in sustainability and development.
The future
  • We have been moving slowly on outreach due to lack of funding, but we intend to expand the program and are ready to do so. We wish to find new partners.
  • We are adding new functionality to Appropedia, first and foremost to serve service learning programs.
What we offer
  • We've had experience with running various kinds of wiki service learning programs, starting with students who've never used wikis. The founder of Appropedia is an engineering instructor at Humboldt State University in California, and a major contributor has been a physics professor at Queens University, Ontario.
  • Ease. Similar to a hosted solution, where the technical load taken by us, the framework already provided and under constant development in response to classes' needs.
  • Security. Records are available as a site dump updated weekly, and at any time as an export of all relevant pages with revision history (go to Special:Export and enter the name of any category of whose pages you wish to download).
  • These programs teach the students wiki literacy, and let them see how their work is used by others (pageview counter, and potentially comments and messages from other users).
  • An experience in collaboration. Pages are rarely developed by just one person.
  • A flagbearer for service learning. Whether or not you're working directly with us, the results of these programs can help you overcome resistance to change. You can point to these programs and say "look, it works!"

We're ready to work with people interested in this kind of learning and sharing, from around the globe.

Service learning programs to date

Courses - Undergraduate and graduate programs include:

Internships - Working closely with Appropedia's experienced team, as well as with their academic supervisors, Appropedia interns gain valuable experience:

Postgraduate students - Working with their academic supervisors and with the Appropedia Foundation and Appropedia community for support, postgraduates do valuable work on Appropedia, often focused on deeper research. Topics to date include online collaboration and Open Source Appropriate Technology. These include Masters students at Queens University, Ayon Shahed (past student and continuing Appropedia contributor), and Ivana Zelenika (current student, 2010).

Examples of content

See also Highlighted service learning pages

Teacher's role

We ask the teachers to:

  • Ensure students use an in progress tag to mark each page, if they don't want the pages edited by others yet.
  • Highlight the best pages from each class, e.g. by listing them at Appropedia:Highlighted pages
  • Marking very low quality pages (e.g. copyright violations, no substantial correct and useful content) with the {{delete}} tag.
  • Let us know when a class has finished, so "in progress" tags can be replaced by class attribution tags (we have a bot that can help with this).
  • Please consider asking your university to support Appropedia financially. Although the Appropedia wiki platform and our help are completely free and open we need and appreciate funds to continue our work.

Note that if a page is low quality (such that you don't want to associate with your class) but still has even a little useful content, then the preferred solution is to:

  • Remove class tags ("in progress" or attribution)
  • Remove problematic material (e.g. copyright violations or incorrect information)
  • Add a relevant tag, e.g. {{stub}}.

Appropedia's role

The Appropedia community:

  • Works on the wiki platform and the help pages, to make the service learning process as smooth as possible
  • Is available to assist with questions and editing needs

Call for service learning partners

Join us to improve the experience and quality of education of your students. Any questions, please leave a message on the talk page, or contact us directly.

Blog posts

Posts from our blog, tagged with service learning: <rss>http://blogs.appropedia.org/tag/service-learning/feed/</rss>

References

  1. Joshua M. Pearce, "Appropedia as a Tool for Service Learning in Sustainable Development", Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 3(1), pp.47-55, 2009.Q-Share pre-print

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Service learning and other wikis

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