Professor at UBC assigns Wikipedia writing to students
Tina Loo substituted writing Wikipedia articles for the usual term paper as the major assignment in HIST 396, her North American environmental history class at UBC.
"In the end, the value of the Wikipedia assignment lies in giving students first hand experience in constructing knowledge. Writing the articles showed them how it's made; that it changes over time, and it does so in part as a result of competition and cooperation. [...] Even though students wrote encyclopedia entries rather than conventional essays, the way they did so – through a Wiki – taught them important lessons about the nature of knowledge and the construction of arguments."
