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?
  • I think that if we want to attract professors in this game we need to give the a lot of control over the process. As the ones who are ultimately responsible for the educational and evaluation process in their classes they would probably not want to be interferred with during the preparatory process. This being said, we can change the wording to say that the article will be turned in at the end of the semester to Citizendium to do whatever they want with it. In this case it would make sense not not make the professor an automatic editor. This would comply with the current policy. However, this will also decrease the likelihood that the professors would want to hang out with us at the end of the semester.--Sorin Adam Matei 14:17, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
    • I now agree with Sorin here. I initially had the same reaction as Steve, but I studied the proposal more carefully, and I agree that, to attract professors to the program, we need to give them considerable latitude, and the payoff of an approved article could be very attractive. Note two things, however. First, other editors can object to the approval of an article. Second, we might specify as a rule that professors should not edit their students' articles if they wish to approve them; they should, instead, offer feedback on the talk page, let the students make the changes, and then approve. Moreover, Sorin, I did agree with your concession--I've actually edited the proposal to remove the part about professors being permanent editors of articles. They should have to re-register if they wish to take an article back over; otherwise, the article goes back into common control. --Larry Sanger 12:56, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

• "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.
  • Good point, with the proviso that what I am trying to do here is to make it as appealing to the professors as possible. How about we create an Eduzendium sandbox, where all articles are created and then released to the world by CZ editors...--Sorin Adam Matei 14:17, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
  • I would say the simpler solution to this problem is one that I wrote into the proposal: simply say that a topic is off-limits (or can be declared off-limits) if it is undergoing active development. But the proportion of CZ articles that will be undergoing active development in any given semester is likely to be small enough that it's all right for professors and their seminars to "take them over" for a while. --Larry Sanger 12:56, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

• "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 (grad student) to post on the wiki with the account of Person Y (his or her prof's).
  • Good point, I was not aware of the limitations imposed on graduate students... This needs to be scrapped...--Sorin Adam Matei 14:17, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
  • Looks like this has already been fixed. --Larry Sanger 12:56, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

• "'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!
  • This does not need to be included in the project, it was just an idea to keep the ball rolling and to create a critical mass of future editors that would linger...--Sorin Adam Matei 14:17, 24 April 2007 (CDT)
  • I can't tell whether Steve is objecting to the fact that articles would change hands from seminar to seminar, or to the fact that they would be assigned to any particular group of people at all. As to the latter, while I agree that this is a bit troubling, it is a small price to pay for a lot of new, high-quality content and participants. As to the former, though, I've edited the proposal so as to remove the idea that "seminar" articles would always henceforth be in the hands of professors and their students. I think we also need to add something to the effect that a workgroup can declare certain articles "off-limits"--but I think that ought to be clear even without saying it. --Larry Sanger 12:56, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

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? See below--Sorin Adam Matei 14:17, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

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

I have edited "can decide the amount of work allocated to contributing the entries to Wikipedia" simply to replace "Wikipedia" with "the Citizendium"--I simply assumed that that's what Sorin meant. --Larry Sanger 12:56, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

The undergirding philosophy of this proposal is that ultimately the ones we want to attract are the professors and that everything we do should benefit the education process. I think that we need to convince them that Eduzendium is something that benefits their students and the educational processes first and foremost. If we ask them to do anything that benefits Eduzendium first, if we ask them to work for us, not with us, we will not have much success in academia.

On the other hand, the proposal has tried to be sensitive to the fact that Citizendium has a specific editorial process, one that balances openness with editorial stewardship. Yet, from what I hear from Steve the limited tenancy process proposed here seems to be to encroaching too much upon the CZ's freeholding system. How about we create an Eduzendium sandbox (Eduzendium labs?) where academics can work on all sorts of articles, including duplicates, with total impunity and absolute autonomy, the only requirment being that whatever they produce should be released to the world under Citizendium's copyright requirements (GDFL?)? The vetting and approval sysem will be taken care by the CZ editors, who will weigh and consdier the value, completness and timeliness of all existing in Eduzendium?--Sorin Adam Matei 14:26, 24 April 2007 (CDT)

I think we need to put it to the community and to the Editorial Council whether we want to allow seminars to "set aside" certain topics for their exclusive work. I think that this is a small price to pay for their work and (later) potential involvement as a part of the community. If a professor and 15 Purdue graduate students wanted to put in hundreds of hours of work creating 15 really high-quality articles, and they "squat" on those topics for only three months, what really is the downside? Bear in mind that they can work with us, if that's what the professor wants.

The idea of an Eduzendium sandbox is a bad one. A large part of the attraction of the assignment is that the results become part of CZ. If Eduzendium participants are relegated to a sandbox, there's no guarantee that their work will be appended to CZ--which completely removes the main incentive.

It's important that professors be able to restrict access, however, because then some students might get help from the CZ community when other students don't; and then Citizens might interfere with the educational process in various undesirable ways. If you want the benefit of instructor involvement, in this way, you've got to give professors some (temporary) authority over some topics. This I think we can do... --Larry Sanger 12:56, 30 May 2007 (CDT)

Why limit the work to graduate students?

Why be so narrow in the use of student products? Not every topic (e.g. elephants) is so sophisticated as to require a graduate student to write the prose.

Why not have undergraduate students in expository writing courses write or expand CZ articles on a specific topics? Likewise, why not have students in a variety of courses write articles relevant to their particular course. Either set of students could work collectively or individually? With course instructors acting as a screening mechanism one should be able to ensure that the products are of sufficiently high quality. With a little organizational creativity one could have an army of undergraduates fleshing out CZ.

Perhaps this "wider net" would best be handled as a parallel project from Eduzendium.

Dan Nachbar 11:07, 15 June 2007 (CDT)

I offer that there is an expectation of what subjects that students of certain educational levels would produce. Example: it is doubtful that a high school student would produce an article on quantum properties of light, unless there was an exceptional student. For undergrads, would there be an expectation that they might produce a physics-related article? Possibly. Would they produce an article based on statistic theory or geology? --Robert W King 11:19, 15 June 2007 (CDT)

Please, continue the discussion here. --Larry Sanger 11:49, 15 June 2007 (CDT)

Why limit the work to academia?

Seth Wolley posted a comment somewhere (and I cannot find it now) saying that in discussing the possibilities of this project we should think outside the box.

As a non-academic lifelong autodidact I also wonder if it is wise to restrict contributions from academia only. Citizenship is a universal concept. Ensuring that the citizenry is properly educated to fulfil their responsibilities as citizens is also a general concern. Academic institutions are subject to control by the prevailing power structure and are not necessarily able to explore the full spectrum of educational needs of a changing society.

If the general readership could also request contributions on the kinds of issues that may be outside the remits of a conventional academic interest, a balance could be struck between quality and range of contributions. -- Janos Abel 06:53, 16 June 2007 (CDT)

Academic institutions are subject to control by the prevailing power structure and are not necessarily able to explore the full spectrum of educational needs of a changing society. While there are certainly pockets where this is true, I very strongly disagree with this as a sweeping generalization. Read some works by Michael Apple or Ira Shor sometime. As for limiting it to academia, how about instead experimenting with something like this?Stephen Ewen 19:28, 16 June 2007 (CDT)