The digital world is upon us. Everybody knows it and nobody ever argues with it anymore. But that’s too general. What is actually changing? What are the specific examples?  Today I came across one, while catching up with Slashdot news. Here is a quote from the post:
 “An inspired professor at University of Washington-Bothell, Martha Groom, made an interesting pedagogical experiment. Instead of vilifying Wikipedia as some academics are prone to do, she assigned the students enrolled in her environmental history course to contribute articles. The result has proven “transformative” to her students. They were no longer spending their time writing for one reader, says Groom, but were doing work of consequence in a “peer reviewed” environment, which enhanced the quality of their output.”
If you read through the comments to the post, there are many insightful thoughts too. Here is one of those that I liked (apart from the age criteria):
Wikipedia should be output, not input, for students past a certain age. It gets them used to writing for real people as opposed to just for getting graded, it gives them the experience of having their writing edited by people of varying abilities, and it gives them motivation for doing research. Another, easier, option would be to assign students to correct Wikipedia articles.
Another comment mentions that this is not by far the first time that this happens. It conveniently links to the page with more examples of school and university projects.
