Archive:Eduzendium

This is a proposed project. It has not yet been adopted.

What is Eduzendium?

Eduzendium is a program in which the Citizendium partners with high-profile doctoral programs and seminars throughout the world to create high-quality, English language entries for the Citizendium. Dr. Sorin Adam Matei, Associate Professor at Purdue University, is Academic Content Coordinator for the program.

What does Eduzendium do?

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

Our project is open for collaborative educational and knowledge generation initiatives with higher education institutions. We strongly believe in the necessity of inviting experts of all kinds to help us build our repository of knowledge.

A distinct approach in this context is our policy of inviting the professors that teach and the students enrolled in foundational/"fundamentals of" doctoral and masters seminars to help us seed or build up our entries with high-quality, clearly-argued and -written content. A pilot program will start with a number of seminars at major "research one" universities in the United States and abroad. To the degree the program will be extended to other graduate programs in the English speaking world.

Philosophically, we believe that the individuals who struggle with the meaning of fundamental concepts on a daily basis make excellent authors and editors for entries on those concepts. Foundational seminars are an ideal site for recruiting such authors and editors because their primary goal is to redefine and communicate for each generation the meaning of the basic and essential issues of our knowledge world. Furthermore, the activity of these seminars is often directed at producing short and insightful papers about some basic concepts which might or might not be later transformed into more "formal" publications. We believe that opening up the Citizendium to collaborative work on specific topic to students and their professors offers them the opportunity to take their work to another, more socially consequential level, which enhances the educational process on the one hand, while helping the Citizendium to build its socially involved and expert friendly knowledge environment, on the other hand.

In brief, we encourage selected faculty and graduate students from a number of foundational seminars at several high profile Universities to write entries about key terms pertaining to a number of disciplines.

To the degree the initiative proves to be successful, we might extend this type of collaboration to other communities of knowledge and practice or to undergraduate programs.

The collaborative process

The collaborative wiki process is similar to the educational process taking place in graduate seminars. The Eduzendium program fosters real life conditions for collaborative intellectual projects within the seminar, which can result in team (group) projects centered around specific topics. Instructors have complete control over the degree and nature of student involvement in the Citizendium. Specifically, they can decide the amount of work allocated to contributing the entries to the Citizendium, the nature of the rewards and penalties to be used in assessing student work, and the quality standards of this work. The instructors and their students have privileged access to specific pages during the period in which they are working on an assignment, and they can decide if a final product can be vetted and released for public consumption or not.

Operationally, the Eduzendium process begins with registering the professors and their students on the Citizendium. This does not require any specific vetting process. Then, the professors and their students propose a number of entries that they would like to write on. These can be existing or newly created entries. With assistance from Citizendium members, especially the Academic Content Coordinator, Dr. Sorin Adam Matei and his graduate students at Citizendium, the academic partners are trained in using the medium and are shown how to edit wiki pages. For a period of time, as long as a semester, the topic pages are editable only by the members of the seminar. Citizendium managers will ensure that only specific users are allowed to edit the chosen pages for the specified period of time. This exception aside, the rules of the editorial process need to be in compliance with the general policies undergirding Citizendium. This means among other things that the topics need to be neutral in tone, consistent, well-written, factually accurate, family-friendly, and should not include original research.

The actual editorial process will be shaped according to each seminar's policies. In certain 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.

In a different scenario, the professor can assign the topics to the entire class, asking the members to work on them simultaneously and edit them during a period of time. He or she can intervene in the editorial process when and if needed.

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. In this situation, the ultimate vetting right is given to the professor, who is also a Citizendium editor. Note that it will always be possible to link to a specific version of an article, even after it has been edited. Note that professors need not approve articles; some may not be approvable.

Afterwards, the articles are then offered for further editing to Citizendium contributors in general, or until another temporary editorship is given to a different seminar team, at the same or another institution.

While Citizendium management gives a wide latitude to Eduzendium participants for purposes of choosing topics, professors may be asked not to choose articles that are currently undergoing active editing by Citizendium contributors. This should still permit very wide latitude of topic choice. Indeed, many seminar topics may not have any articles written at all.

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.

The educational benefits are plain if a student writes a general, neutral encyclopedia article on a topic, in addition to an opinionated paper about some special aspect of the topic.

How to register

If you are a professor and you would like to register your course in the Eduzendium program, please send mail Dr. Sorin Matei, smatei <<at>> purdue <<dot>> edu, with information about yourself and your seminar. In the process of getting you set up, we will create a wiki page for your seminar and choose a list of topics that your seminar will manage. Topics can be chosen "on the fly" as well--for instance, students may suggest topics.

Seminars that collaborate with EDUZENDIUM

Purdue University

• COM 632 Online Interaction, Fall 2007, instructor Dr. Sorin Adam Matei