Heat and Mass Transfer in Magmatology
People from all audiences use the openly editable, fast growing Wikipedia Encyclopaedia. I assigned students to read a scientific article, present it orally and rephrase it for a non-scientific audience by editing and creating Wikipedia pages. Having little communication skills, the exercise was challenging. This teaching project encourages individual and group learning, public and scientific communication, and collaboration, with a lot of fun. The still evolving product has a worldwide impact.
Keywords
Course description
Project description
Communication: Communication is very important transferable skill in academia, but also in governmental and non-governmental agencies, industry and with the society. Presenting and confronting ideas allows transferring and improving knowledge within the community. Scientific and public communications are distinct in several aspects.
Online teaching: Distant teaching and learning has become even more critical in Spring 2020 (and beyond?), due to social distancing during the COVID-19 crisis. This project is very timely, offering tools that can be used by every teacher to teach and supervise their student and keep them motivated.
Learning: I made the hypothesis that the student’s amount of learning would be bigger while thinking how to rephrase a scientific article into a large public Wikipedia page than by reading that scientific article. I used the multilingual, web-based, worldwide top reference Wikipedia free Encyclopaedia as a digital educational tool during an Earth Sciences reading seminar (7 weeks, 1 ECTS class), assigning students to rephrase scientific articles for the public.
Procedure: Students have read a scientific article, presented it orally and answered questions from classmates. During the last two classes and as homework, students have edited and created Wikipedia pages in relation to their article’s topic. They have then reviewed and updated pages from their peers prior to submission to the Wikipedia community. 3 articles out of 6 have been published.
We had four goals during the Wikipedia exercise:
1) Practice scientific communication,
2) Develop writing skills,
3) Develop communication skills for a non-scientific audience,
4) Improve and extend the Wikipedia Encyclopedia.
Assessments: Very active, students really enjoyed creating a Wikipedia page. They had little experience with communication and considered this exercise was challenging. The students went through successive construction of explanations:
1) self-explanation while reading the scientific article,
2) discussed and explained the content by groups of two and to peers,
3) got challenged by questions from peers,
4) reformulated to the non-scientific public,
5) reflected on their work during peer revision.
Evaluation shows that writing about a scientific paper in a Wikipedia page is a less efficient learning technique than reading a scientific article, presenting it orally or listening to such a presentation. However, it contributes to better understand and memorise important information, it is an efficient way to practice writing and public and scientific communication skills and it encourages students to work collaboratively on real-time projects. The teachers can use those combined effects as a multi-channel learning technique. Discovery, exploration, mental stimulation, and excitement foster learning enjoyment (Packer, 2010) and, through its novelty and real-world usefulness, using modern digital media techniques has the potential to be more enjoyable than most other traditional class assignments (Konieczny, 2012). It is very rewarding to have project deliverables that have a measurable impact: the 3 published pages are viewed monthly by 23, 132 and 180 visitors worldwide and further edited (i.e. each year, this is ca. 200x more than the attendance to the class!).
Contact information
J. Leuthold, A. Gilli (2018); Communication to the non-scientific public using the Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia; ETH D-ERDW Dozentenluchseminar, Zürich. -J. Leuthold, A. Gilli (2018); Communication to the non-scientific public using the Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia; ETH Learning and Teaching Journal: 1:1. ISSN 2624-7992
J. Leuthold, A. Gilli (2018); Communication to the non-scientific public using the Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia; ETHZ Learning and Teaching Fair, Zürich.
J. Leuthold, P. Scherrer, A. Gilli (2018); Communication to the non-scientific public using the Wikipedia Free Encyclopedia; EGU Vienna.