This course will become read-only in the near future. Tell us at community.p2pu.org if that is a problem.

grass is green


Search Wikipedia stubs and adopt an article in need

I wanted to give a brief, early bird demo of  this whole "picking an article" thing to help folks think about this project. Don't worry, we're going to ease into this and more over the first couple weeks!

  1. I went to the Wikipedia: Portal Directory
  2. Found the Education Portal.
  3. Found the (related) Wikiproject: Education which is lucky to be active!
  4. It has a list of "stub" articles (short articles, not so good yet).
  5. And I found one I liked... it is sort of perfect for our P2PU course ;)


Experts, any thoughts or comments (i.e. this is a "collaborative task" so share any articles you're thinking about this early).

Task Discussion


  • Jenifferhomes said:

    at times there are tasks are no longer in the proper order. This makes it difficult for new students. Does anyone know how to put them back in the proper order? And does anyone remember the right order of the tasks (a new student asked me).

    on May 3, 2012, 8:23 a.m.
  • Sage Ross said:

    The "Lecture hall" article sounds fun, but I think maybe something with a larger scope and more diverse set of good sources would better for this.  That way, it's easier for someone to research and write an individual section.

    Finding the good sources specifically about lecture halls will also be a challenge, I think, from browsing Google Scholar a bit, since most references to "lecture hall" (even in article titles) are metaphorical, kind of a shorthand for 'traditional learning situation' rather than a literal lecture hall.

    But, there are some interesting sources if you dig hard enough... a lot about lecture hall technology for teaching math and science, and some older stuff about subject-specific lecture hall design, like lecture halls for chemistry.  There's also a fair bit about virtual lecture halls, some of which probably explore the philosophical side of the concept of a lecture hall.

    My personal bias would be to shoot for some more central topic that is in bad shape but gets a lot of traffic.  Lecture hall typically gets just a few dozen hits per day.

    on Sept. 16, 2011, 10:36 a.m.

    Matt said:

    Good points, I'm not totally set on it. BUT I did like the direction of choosing an analog classroom technology like a physical room given this course is on p2pU ;)

    I'm definitely keeping my eyes open, we have a few weeks before we need to "pick" articles...

    on Sept. 16, 2011, 1:30 p.m. in reply to Sage Ross

    Sage Ross said:

    Yeah, I do like that old/new dynamic.

    on Sept. 16, 2011, 1:33 p.m. in reply to Matt

    vVvA said:

    I like the idea of choosing an article that is related to education, teaching, and learning. I found five that can compete with the lecture hall:

    * peer taught classes

    * open education

    * interactive writing

    * mass education

    * knowledge building communities

    on Sept. 20, 2011, 10:28 p.m. in reply to Matt

    Matt said:

    These are great suggestions, thanks!

    on Sept. 22, 2011, 8:45 p.m. in reply to vVvA

    Greg said:

    So, my personal vote is for open education or something similar. I know it is the "obvious" choice, but those articles aren't the most informative yet, and I really do think that having better WP articles on open education/peer learning/etc will encourage wider acceptance/awareness. I don't know if we need more awareness/acceptance of lecture halls (we need less!) ;)

    on Sept. 25, 2011, 5:29 p.m. in reply to Matt

    Jonas Backelin said:

    I agree with Greg the article on 'Open Education' in WP is limited and can become our subject for a Features Article.  The model of ‘Open Education’ means different things to different people, but our understanding of this concept can impact practices that involves learning, teaching, sharing or utilize knowledge in a collaborative and interactive way (as seen in P2PU).

    Terms such as ‘Learning 2.0’, ‘Collective Intelligence’, ‘Long Tail’ and ‘Virtual Communities of Practice’ will be hard to deal with.  There are philosophical ideas of educational opportunities to all and it may also include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning (maybe we need more time for this…).

    on Sept. 27, 2011, 4:08 p.m. in reply to Greg

    Matt said:

    Aha, I think you and I disagree Greg about the value of the lecture hall. What made me interested in the topic was the history and the concepts related to lecture format teaching/learning. If we are to move beyond the status quo (e.g. lecture) for teaching various subjects, we need some referent, some understanding of past and current practice, in order to forge a new praxis.

    That being said, I am not necessarily tied to the article, in fact, working on a more important or higher impact article would be better.

    on Sept. 28, 2011, 2:11 p.m. in reply to Greg

    Matt said:

    I agree, maybe we will need more time to make some substantial contributions, or contributions at a featured quality. But the idea of this course is to dive in head-first, and really start to ask tough questions about article writing.

    Let's also remember here that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, a tertiary source. It uses verifiable information that refers directly to reliable sources in order to provide an accessible, concise, but sufficient summary of a given subject.

    The trick (in part) becomes finding sources that convey all important ideas of the subject, without being too wordy, and without missing any point of import.

    on Sept. 28, 2011, 2:18 p.m. in reply to Jonas Backelin

    Jonas Backelin said:

    I have been thinking about three generations in education (based on Terry Andersons ideas).  The lecture hall (Teacher-2-Student) has evolved to inquire/project learning (Student-2-Student) and now we talk about networked learning (World-2-Student).  I'm curios about the trend one-2-many has become many-2-one, which require filtering, aggregating and curating...

    I belive this discussion will contribute to a "featured quality" of either 'Lecture Hall' or 'Open Education', so lets decide and move to next task...   

    10/6 - Ways of editing: subject matter experts, editors/contributors, and gnomes! (WEEKLY GOALS: Selecting extremely specific area(s), article(s), or section(s))

    BTW: How do we invite the gnomes and how will they edit the article? devil

    on Oct. 9, 2011, 8:16 a.m. in reply to Matt