MisesWiki:How can teachers and students use it?
The MisesWiki can be used for more than for research! Both professors and students can profit from it.
Contents
Reasoning
On 14 March 2011, Jeffrey Tucker and Dick Clark had the following exchange about the benefits of student assignments to edit wikis:
Tucker: I look at the Mises Wiki right now and I'm thinking okay, this is something that's going to outlive me. You know, I mean, it's going to grow and grow. Another use for it that occurred to me was that professors can assign students to write entries, right? I mean, if you're a student, you could turn in a little paper, and whatever, and then it disappears. What are you going to do? I get student submissions all the time. People write, "I wrote this paper for my class. What can you do with it?" I look at it and I go, "Well, the problem is it's a paper for a class." I mean, that's what it's for. But if you're writing an encyclopedia entry, it requires just as much research, just as much thought, and probably even more discipline. And you're learning wikicode. And you're contributing something broader than just to yourself and your little physical classroom.
Clark: And, well, and from the student's perspective, instead of, you know, this little one-off project that's going to go down the memory hole as soon as I get a grade on it, now I'm working on something that's gonna matter. People are gonna read, potentially, you know, hundreds or thousands of people are going to come across my article. And that gives me as a student, right, that would give me a much greater incentive to write a quality article, to do my best work, not just to do good enough. And, you know, it's funny you should bring this up, because —
Tucker: You've got graders, too. You've got potentially thousands of graders out there.
Clark: Exactly. Exactly right. You'll find out quick if it's not good quality.
Uses
- On the lowest level, teachers can simply encourage students to use their works for the wiki. That way, their work won't be lost and can find a broad audience. Teachers wanting to go this route may wish to give their students this handout along with their syllabus on the first day of class.
- Teachers can require their students to create or update a wiki page as part of their assignments.
- A group of students could cooperatively create a page (or a series of pages focused on a specific topic), documenting their current subject.
- Instead of looking for new topics all the time, a teacher can simply choose a topic that is lacking in some respect, and let the students improve it.
Advantages
- Students can connect their work to a large wiki with an Austrian/libertarian focus. Many basic terms, like profit, investment or inflation are already researched and can be easily linked to.
- Students learn to cooperate with others and reference their to original sources - while the existing materials can point them to more.
- Editors of the Mises Wiki can help students to polish their work.
- All changes are automatically tracked and can be undone. Mistakes can be easily corrected and work can be associated with its author.
How to do it?
- Let your students create a user account and report to you their username before they start editing.
- Check existing pages related to the topic and note which ones are missing or could use an improvement (feel free to consult the Talk page and existing users of the Mises Wiki).
- Assign the research topics by any means you prefer - let the students choose, assign it randomly or directly.
- The students should execute their work. (Feel free to monitor their work via Recent Changes or by following(insert link) the respective pages!)
Who did what or how can you track changes?
You can see the whole history of a page via (insert description and image)
You can easily compare the changes via (insert description and image)
(more to follow)
