It has occurred to me that we probably have a higher chance of getting editors that stick around through wikis in the classrooms. What do you think?
I recall there being a thread (by Krystle?) about a professor using wikiHow as a teaching tool in his class. I can’t be assed to go through archives to find it, but yeah, I remember that. It’s a neat idea!
In fifth grade my teacher told us to use wikiHow. But most kids vandalized though.
It probably depends on the age level of the students. Most younger kids would vandalize. (Maybe the teacher would lower their grade for that?) Otherwise, I think it’s an awesome idea!
The schools around here give detentions to people who use anything wiki. I hate enforcing that, too.
In middle school, Wikipedia and wikiHow was banned. wikiHow was banned because of ‘unsmart people trying to copy eHow’.
It might seem dubious but true. Any wiki, even a wiki made by the smartest person in the world would be banned. They let us use eHow because that you can’t edit there. What they don’t understand about wikis is that there is RC patrol and you can revert the edit.
@Metsguy234
You have to be 18 or older to write eHow articles. Lets get back on topic.
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Many academics over a certain age have the strange idea that all wikis are unreliable, and this is due to a bit of elitism on their parts. Accessible knowledge able to be edited by the masses is frightening to people that have built their entire careers in certain industries, and they respond by attempting to kill this developing online culture.
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Some eHow writers are paid for their work. Joining it is not easy. The traditionalists are fine with this kind of system. The knowledge base can only be edited by a select few, and the select few are likely to be other field specialists. The layman/volunteer group is guaranteed to be less educated and slightly less polished, but they have something that the traditionalists do not: a wide-ranging diversity of experiences. This is why the layman/volunteer group is best suited to editing a how-to website; practical knowledge will be written by practical people.
I have taught wikis to two groups of middle schoolers through the Citizen Schools afterschool apprenticeship program in Boston. I had the whole class work on the same wiki to help them learn about technology and build their collaboration skills. I am also working on coming up with a ciriculum to teach high school girls how to edit Wikipedia and have taught workshops on wikis and wikiHow at the Boston Skillshare, which @Maluniu
attended. I do not know if any of the people in my classes went on to edit wikis, except for one middle schooler who did not end up in my class but used Wetpaint (which I mentioned at an Apprenticeship Fair) to make a wiki to spread gossip about his school. I hope they still edit, but I haven’t seen them around. The wikiHow workshop at the Boston Skillshare did give me the chance to meet a long-time reader of wikiHow. I learned about wikis through a lecture about Wikipedia at my local library and that’s what got me into wikis and wikiHow. Many libraries have tech workshops and I think that’s a good way to teach people about wikis. The problem with teaching a wiki class is that if you want people to edit, you need access to a computer lab and that can be difficult to get at many speaking venues. I really think learning about wikis needs to be done hands on, instead of having someone just sit there at a podium with a bunch of Powerpoint slides. The NYC Wikimedia Chapter, however, does teach beginner Wikipedia workshops at the New York Public Library and a co-working space in NYC. So, I think this is possible, particularly in areas of the country where there’s more than one wikiHowian like Washington, DC, Maryland or San Francisco. At Recent Changes Camp in Boston, I wanted there to be a Wiki 101 event, where people could learn how to edit wikis. I hope that this happens in the future.
Stories like this sound dubious.
I’ve never heard of a school hawking eHow. Especially considering anyone can submit articles to eHow (if my understanding is correct).
I’ve seen people like this with Wikipedia. I’m doubting though that teachers are going around hawking eHow.
