Inside Higher Education reports that Wikipedia, in its efforts to improve and expand its relationship with academia, held the first Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit last week. Attendees were professors who have actively incorporated Wikipedia into their teaching, as well as faculty who are interested in doing so. According to the report, over two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework, and many of these campuses have “Wikipedia ambassadors” tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, was the speaker who gave the opening address, saying that his office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a “Wikipedian in residence” in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
At the Summit, Carnegie Mellon University researcher Rosta Farzan demoed a set of new course software tools aimed at making it easier for professors to assign and evaluate Wikipedia-related assignments. The free software includes a dashboard for instructors to track student work and provide private feedback on edits, as well as a new course page builder to help instructors create useful and well-structured course pages.
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