Education/Newsletter/March 2013/Chesapeake College Wikipedia Project

An online section of IDC 201 "The Nature of Knowledge" at Chesapeake College is using Wikipedia both as a final project and major course theme. The course revolves around how different disciplines investigate questions and construct knowledge, but every pair of instructors chooses a different theme. Our theme is how knowledge is altered when it becomes digital and networked. As such, we have or will talk about crowdsourcing, online privacy, and of course Wikipedia. We're reading Joseph Reagle's Good Faith Collaboration alongside the dystopian fiction of George Orwell and Franz Kafka. The final, culminating project will be applying what we've learned to some of the less developed Wikipedia articles about our local region, such as Chesapeake College and Wye Mills, MD. Eric Phetteplace is the instructor heading up the Wikipedia assignments and he welcomes feedback about the class.