Announcement: Appropedia has internship positions open for 2012.

Appropedia's service learning programs helps to create an essential knowledge base for the world via a learning experience for individuals and classes. The Appropedia Foundation and the Appropedia community work with universities and learning programs to create these opportunities. Appropedia has been shown to be a particularly useful tool for educators to provide service learning.[1]

This can be considered a Constructivist[2] approach, as the students learn by doing.

Science, engineering, health and humanities

Under construction: Please excuse the unfinished bits. Planned to be tidied up by 21 March 2012.

From soil science and sustainable food production to physics and energy efficiency, to life cycle analysis, science provides the basis for rigorous Physics of Energy and the Environment

Environmental sciences - Environmental Impact Assessment and Life Cycle Analysis

Education. Study this service learning program, and/or develop enhancements for it. Develop an engaging and short online course for a relevant subject (e.g. a permaculture, green building or climate action topic).

Built environment, including construction, architecture and urban planning.

Engineering Engineering for Sustainable Development - materials, industrial ecology renewable energy, water and sanitation, and the relationship between technology and the environment - and of course construction, mentioned above under "built environment".

Engineering and appropriate technology classes develop much of the hands-on material on Appropedia, describing the making of natural paints and construction using alternative building techniques. More conventional applications of sustainable design are planned for expansion.

Health: Medical technology and public health information has been growing rapidly on Appropedia starting in late 2011, through the Global Health Compendium.

Solar Photovoltaic Materials, Cells and Systems Engineering Alternative Energy Systems permaculture design course

Design, Introduction to Design

There is also an important place for the humanities in our service learning programs. For example:

  • Languages. Translating Appropedia pages has been motivating for students, knowing that their work can make a difference in the world, compared to artificial translation tasks.
  • Communications. Raising awareness of Appropedia is an important part of our strategy to have an increasing positive impact. This includes extensive use of social media.

International Mass Communication

  • Anthropology and sociology. A unifying theme in Appropedia is appropriate technology, emphasizing the importance of context and cultural understanding in every sustainability action, every development program and every application of technology.
  • Economics, finance and commerce. Development economics, from microfinance to international policies, is a central part of international development.

Not all classes fit into these categories. For example, permaculture classes span food production, sustainability, design, appropriate technology, water and sanitation.

See the suggested topics for content interns for examples of specific topics intended to be developed.

Programs

The main streams are:

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.

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 and internships

There are many ways that students and academics can and do contribute to Appropedia, as well as benefiting from the site:

  • Classes can work on Appropedia as part of their assessment:
    • Creating topic pages
    • Carry out projects, documenting it on the wiki - design, steps, what worked and what should be done differently.
    • Translate pages
  • Academics and researchers can share what they are doing, describing their work (whatever they are willing to share under our free license), and collaborate with others on the site.
  • Students (or any suitable person) can intern with Appropedia, focusing on:
    • Knowledge sharing, e.g. through porting work
    • IT-related work, helping to manage, troubleshoot and/or develop the site.
    • Engagement and/or publicity
    • Fundraising

See Portal:Service learning, and don't hesitate to get in touch. We'd love to work with more classes and are keen to support the needs of students and educators!

Platforms

Appropedia's main platform is MediaWiki,W the knowledge sharing software used by Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation websites. Additional functionality is provided through extensions.

There is also a WordPress site which can be used for specific applications, including blog posts.

Our platforms are under continual development, subject to resources, and specific feature requests can always be considered.


Examples

For a more complete listing, explore the categories:

.

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) 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:

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

Guide for teachers

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

The Appropedia Foundation:

  • Plays a coordinating role


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.


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
  2. wikipedia:Constructivism (learning theory): "The Constructivist (e.g. Dewey; Montessori; Kolb) learning process is experiential learning through real life experience to construct and conditionalize knowledge. The type of learning is problem based adaptive learning that challenges faulty schema, integrates new knowledge with existing knowledge, and allows for creation of original work or innovative procedures."

Blog posts

Posts from our blog, tagged with service learning:

<rss>http://blogs.appropedia.org/tag/service-learning/feed/</rss>


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Beyond Appropedia: other wikis

As well as the classes using Appropedia, other wikis have students working with them, creating content:

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See also

Interwiki links

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