Students Learning (and Teaching) the Universe through Wiki-style Pages

Resource Title:

Technology Type:

Online Writing and Discussion

Technology Tool:

Wiki

Pedagogical Goal:

Facilitating collaborative authorship, editing, or peer review

Promoting student reflection and critical thinking

Increasing engagement and/or interactivity

Course Type:

Lecture

Academic Area:

Arts and Humanities

Discipline:

History and Near Eastern Studies

Faculty Name:

Douglas Northrup

As a way to encourage students to integrate information from a variety of sources, students in one of Douglas Northrop's (LSA's History and Middle East Studies department) courses create a set of wiki-style pages as the primary, semester-long assignment. Students collaborate to construct, revise, peer-review, and then interlink web modules that are hosted on the Exhibit Museum of Natural History's webpage.

Each group’s module aims to teach an unspecified public audience online how their discipline “works”, including:

how it approaches evidence
what kinds of sources it uses
what questions it asks
what is at stake in the answers