The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

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

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

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?

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]

Retrieved from "https://www.appropedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appropedia_talk:Initiatives/Service_learning/Guide&oldid=1040575"
Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.