Talk:Archive:Eduzendium

I propose that we allow one or two weeks comment period for this proposal. Comments? --Larry Sanger 19:00, 20 April 2007 (CDT)

By Stephen Ewen

As an educator I think this is an excellent teaching tool and very much hope something like this can be approved. I do have a few concerns/questions about this proposal in its present form:

• "...the ultimate vetting right is given to the professor who is also an editor ... At the end of the allocated period of time the professor or the class can look over the final product and decide if they would like to vet the product and make it into an "approved" Citizendium article." - Well, this would seem to violate current approval policy. "Editors working individually may approve articles if they have not contributed significantly to the article." If the editor has contributed to it significantly--and I cannot see how we can say the professor in this case did not--then another editor must approve it under Individual Approval. (Group approval seems to really apply when three editors have each worked on the article). Don't you think it would be more real-world to students if approval were out of their professor's control?

• "The instructors and their students have privileged access to specific pages during the semester and they can decide if a final product can be vetted and released for public consumption or not. ... the topic pages are editable only by the members of the seminar. Citizendium will ensure, using appropriate user rights safeguards, that only specific users are allowed to edit the chosen pages for the specified period of time". This could clearly be problematic if this includes article pages that already exist and that are active. I cannot at this time see a clear way to us kicking off the general public from already existing articles that are active.

• "The articles can then be offered for further editing to the public, the professor or one or more of his graduate students becoming the official "editors" of that topic." Again, this breaks current policy. For graduate students to become editors, they would already have to qualify, generally, for tenure within the field of the article. If supervised grad students can be editors, then certainly if I am supervised I can be one, too, right (rhetorical question only)? And it should be completely against policy for Person X to post on the wiki with Person Y's account.

• "'rolling' editorship". This is the most troubling aspect, to me. It effectively rolls the general public off of the article as new seminars of students come and go. In come students, off goes everyone else—off goes students, in comes everyone else—and so on. This may work to be not an addition to Citizendium, but simply a trade-off between one set of writers (students) for another (public citizens). I really do not think the general public, particularly if articles they are working on are active and moving toward approval, will at all take kindly to having pages locked but to only a new seminar group!

Overall, I like this proposal's general idea. In fact, I think the core of it is just great for student learning outcomes. But in my mind, there are some issues that need addressing, first.

Question for Dr. Matei: You mentioned that professors "can decide the amount of work allocated to contributing the entries to Wikipedia". I am assuming that, there, students will have no special privileges whatsoever. Is there a way you can tailor this program to allow students to achieve the same basic learning outcomes, but at the improved environment of Citizendium, without requiring they be given as many special privileges?

—Stephen Ewen 23:56, 20 April 2007 (CDT) (Who read Wenger & Snyder in his own grad program) ;-)