Archive:Eduzendium

Eduzendium is a program in which the Citizendium partners with university programs throughout the world to create high-quality, English language entries for the Citizendium.

If you have registered with Citizendium, you can start a page for your Eduzendium course here. Just type the title of your course in this inputbox (it has to start with "CZ:", which we have filled in already), and a suite of course pages will be prepared automagically when you press the button and follow the instructions.

How to join

For more specific details about recruitment and specific mechanisms and utilities for collaboration please go to the dedicated Eduzendium Recruitment Page.

Operational details

How to categorize your pages, how to add templates to the page, how to register and retrieve passwords, etc.

What does Eduzendium do?

The Citizendium invites university instructors to include the crafting of a Citizendium article as an assignment.

In brief, we encourage faculty to use the Citizendium as a platform for their students to write public entries about key terms pertaining to a number of disciplines.

The collaborative process

The Eduzendium program is designed to be extremely flexible and adaptable.

A very simple and direct collaboration would be where the professor would take the students to sign up on the Citizendium and perform a certain amount of work or to initiate and actively collaborate on a specific entry. In other situations the professors can charge specific students to write specific entries, which can be evaluated and edited for content and style individually. Editorial changes can be operated by the professor, by a team designated by the professor or by his or her entire class. This can be done using our wiki platform, in which case the topic can be reserved and closed to public access for a limited period of time. (You must ask, however, and make your intentions very clear.) Professors and their students can obtain access to a specific namespace or wiki page, which will be editable and even readable only by them for a period of time (typically, until the assignments are finished).

In essence, the Eduzendium program fosters real life conditions for collaborative intellectual projects within the participating seminars, which can result in a diversity of team (group) or individual projects. Instructors and students can get complete control over the degree and nature of the editorial process. Specifically, they can decide the nature of the assignments and the degree to which they will be completed in collaboration with other students or with the Citizendium community, the amount of work allocated to contributing Citizendium, the nature of the rewards and penalties to be used in assessing student work, and the quality standards of this work. Finally, they can decide if, how much and when their work can be officially published on Citizendium.

What are the educational benefits?

Writing a high-quality encyclopedia article about a specific topic requires, and trains, a specific sort of effort or discipline. Simply producing a suitably informative, but neutral, definition of a concept can require a great deal of thought. Crafting a jumble of facts into a coherent narrative, which the Citizendium requires, is a difficult, but rewarding and educational task. Furthermore, it practices a very useful scholarly skill to investigate and decide on what the most reliable bibliography items for an article are.

Some Citizendium articles that were started in Eduzendium

University of Edinburgh; articles on the theme of Appetite and Obesity that were originally written by undergraduate students, working in groups of about 4 students.

•  Circadian rhythms and appetite: Daily variations in the regulation of food intake. ^[e]
•  Energy balance in pregnancy and lactation: Adaptations in the control of food intake and energy expenditure in different reproductive states. ^[e]
•  Evolution of appetite regulating systems: Comparisons of the mechanisms regulating food intake and energy expenditure between species. ^[e]
•  Glucostatic theory of appetite control: The theory that changes in blood glucose concentrations or arteriovenous glucose differences are detected by glucoreceptors that affect energy intake. ^[e]
•  Melanocortins and appetite: The regulation of food intake through neuropeptides related to adrenocorticotropic hormone. ^[e]
•  Stress and appetite: The interactions between the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis and the regulation of food intake. ^[e]
•  Food reward: The brain mechanisms involved in reinforcing feeding behaviour. ^[e]
•  Gut-brain signalling: The interaction between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain. ^[e]
•  Diabesity: A term referring to the intricate relationship between type 2 diabetes and obesity. ^[e]
•  Genetics of obesity: The evidence for a genetic component to obesity in humans. ^[e]
•  Bariatric surgery: The surgical removal of body fat. ^[e]
•  Drug treatments for obesity: Treatments of obesity that are based on drugs. ^[e]
•  Exercise and body weight: Correlation between physical activity and the body mass index. ^[e]
•  Health consequences of obesity: Long-term effects of obesity on health. ^[e]

Other examples

•  Music perception: The study of the neural mechanisms involved in people perceiving rhythms, melodies, harmonies and other musical features. ^[e]
•  Speech Recognition: The ability to recognize and understand human speech, especially when done by computers. ^[e]
•  Mashup: A data visualization created by combining data with multiple computer applications. ^[e]

See also

• A list of courses already integrated in Citizendium

• Eduzendium Testimonials — Eduzendium instructors discuss their experiences here.

• Eduzendium press release - January 24, 2008

References

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