Wikipedia contribution is a “transformative” learning task
Last week Gerard was chatting to me in a roundabout way about the free font movement, and how in the 60s there were a lot of anti-this and anti-that movements and he didn’t like the way they were so negative; better to have pro-this and pro-that movements, and I totally agree.
So I was happy to see Slashdot report a professor taking a proactive and positive approach to the Wikipedia smackdown:
An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven “transformative” to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a “peer reviewed” environment, which enhanced the quality of their output.
I’m reminded of the Greenwich Information Design 2007 conference, which ended with a session where all the attendees clustered off into small groups to improve sections of Wikipedia’s Information Design page. Sadly the effort didn’t get much follow-through and the page is much the time 8 months on. That page was ranked 1st when googling for the term at the time, although I see today the classic infodesign site has topped it again.
Googling for typeface design brings up Wikipedia’s Typeface page first and the MATD permaurl second. But there are a mere 1.5 million hits for that query. Turns out that (according to Wikipedia ;-) “the art and craft of designing typefaces is called type design” and that query has a reasonable 621 million hits, wherein MATD doesn’t scratch the top 50.
This reminds me that I need to invest some time into non-lame SEO skills this term.
That top 50 is an interesting browse at the moment, with Kottke on peer production for fonts of classic typefaces a cool hit to see (although of course, I’m personally much more interested in make new typeface designs) and a recent BoingBoing link to someone scanning old books of lettering just for fun was fun to see too.
“Nomen est omen,” as +Fravia is fond of saying.
The Wikipedia contribution is a “transformative” learning task by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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