- Appropedia has internship positions open for 2011.
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 the United States and Canada using the wiki as a platform for service learning, and we plan to expand this to other universities and other countries. 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 work of the class and the university, and contributes to a global body of knowledge to solutions in sustainability and development.
- The future
- We are expanding the program and are ready to work with 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 an engineering professor at Queens University, Kingston.
- 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:
- ENGR115 Intro to Engineering
- ENGR215 Introduction to Design
- PH261 Physics of Energy and the Environment
- ENGR305 Appropriate Technology
- JMC330 International Mass Communication
- ENGR308 Technology and the Environment
- MECH370 Materials Processing
- ENGR410 Environmental Impact Assessment
- MECH425 Engineering for Sustainable Development
- MECH820 Solar Photovoltaic Materials, Cells and Systems Engineering
- ENVS353 Alternative Energy Systems
- Tacomepai permaculture design course
- Copyediting
- Languages (page translation):
- Abroad programs:
- Summits and groups:
Internships - Working closely with Appropedia's experienced team, as well as with their academic supervisors, Appropedia interns gain valuable experience:
- Appropedia:Internships describes the various programs.
- Appropedia:Current and past interns describes some of the people and their work.
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) of the Queens Applied Sustainability Group.
Examples of content
Students create valuable pages on a wide variety of subjects - which remain as part of this living open knowledge resource, to be improved further. Just a few examples:
- Charcoal Cooler
- Design of a low-cost household water treatment system
- Laser surface texturing
- Solar resource measurement for PV applications
- The solar resource
- Zeer pot refrigeration (design)
- Arcata Marsh (follow links to sub-topics)
Particularly valuable and high quality content is regularly highlighted on Appropedia's main page as well as through our social media channels.
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
- ↑ 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
Read more
- Portal:Service learning
- Service learning posts on the Appropedia Foundation's blog.
Service learning and other wikis
As well as the classes using Appropedia, other wikis have students working with them, creating content:
- WikiProgress[1] and WikiGender[2] (both OECD initiatives) have a service learning program involving university classes in France.[verification needed]
- Wikipedia has had several examples of service learning, including:
- WikiProject Murder Madness and Mayhem
- Public policy initiative, supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, reported August 2010.
- WikiProject Classroom coordination on Wikipedia. "Provide guidance to educators who incorporate Wikipedia writing assignments into their classrooms."
See also:
- Service learning - another index of service learning projects on various wikis.