The lessons learned from the first iteration were useful in updating the assignment for a different course offered in fall 2019, spring 2020, and fall 2020: Technology and Culture. In this course, editing and talking about Wikipedia intersected with several course themes, and so it made sense to develop this into a semester-long project. Students selected an existing article relevant to the course to contribute to or identified a topic/person relevant to the course in which to create a new Wikipedia article. is longer project also made it easier to check students’ progress week by week and allowed time for students to review their peers’ drafted contributions in the WikiEdu sandbox (along with instructor feedback) before moving their edits to “Live” Wikipedia. In addition, students were required to write weekly summaries of assigned readings using “Wikipedia-style” neutral writing. Many students acknowledged that this type of writing was hard but also helped them learn how to better synthesize things they read (as well as how to paraphrase without plagiarizing). As one student wrote, “The main takeaway I received from contributing to Wikipedia is it has made me an overall better writer. Wikipedia has taught me how to concisely and accurately produce meaningful information based on academic sources.” Throughout the iterative collaboration we were also able to connect editing Wikipedia to the course content in a way that helped students connect to core learning objectives in new ways.
Understanding Technology and Culture through Wikipedia
In Technology and Culture, the weekly WikiEdu trainings were scaffolded to connect with course topics. For instance, the discussion of “content gaps” on Wikipedia was covered in the same week the often-forgotten role of women as the earliest computer programmers was discussed (Abbate, 2012). Through our collaboration we found ways to do this better and more robustly over time. Following the fall 2019 semester where students had trouble finding media and images
