User:Dotkalm

I tell students the missing puzzle piece in the Wikipedia logo stands for three types of absent knowledge: what is not entered, what is not articulated well enough, and what is not yet discovered.





My name is Robert Kalm. Call me Bob. I edited Wikipedia for the first time in 2010 while researching my first university lecture on the subject. I love editing and research because I love to write. To encourage good use of all three online, I teach Wikipedia at the academic level and in workshops. My students have contributed to Wikipedia since 2010.

On Wikipedia
I want more high schools, universities, and faculty to recognize the benefits of open-source knowledge, wikis, and Wikipedia as readily as they do the fears surrounding them. Wikipedia’s heaviest contributions should come from classrooms. I see the Internet as heir to humanity’s long tradition of knowledge through authorship, scholarship, journalism, and reference, despite recent setbacks.

I use Wikipedia to anchor a graduate course module focused on research, inquiry, sources, citation, bibliography, and curation. Wikipedia is a powerful example of research, writing, and editing, as well as information architecture and interdisciplinary ideation. It also provides a valuable contrast to original research. My research module’s primary assignment is a rough draft Wikipedia article published on students’ course blogs. I encourage students with A+ assignments to use the Wikipedia Article Wizard to publish, and many have done so succesfully.

The Interactive Courses
My Wikipedia module is part of an online writing and rhetoric course called The Interactive Voice, which is part of a modern core curriculum I designed for high schools and colleges that uses the Web and its software applications like Wikipedia to represent a modern “Interactive Humanities.”

The Interactive Voice additionally uses hyperlinks as the modern thesis statement, avatars to understand identity and integrity, algorithms to explore logic and structure, and Twitter to emphasize sentence clarity and grammar.

The curriculum also includes The Interactive Vision on visual communications and The Interactive Venture on idea planning and application.

I tested my courses primarily at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut in their MS in Interactive Media program, but also taught medical students from Quinnipiac’s Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine, undergrads at the Community College of Vermont, retirees at Dartmouth College’s Osher program, and artists, small business owners, and other professionals in individual workshops.

My objective is a Web-based core curriculum which serves, inspires, and unites all age groups and disciplines through mobile social media.

Meta-Learning
Writing is transcribed life; it’s metacognition. Teaching experimental courses online through blogs, apps, and social media is transcribed teaching and meta-learning. The last ten years involved a tremendous amount of work researching and stretching the teaching possibilities of multiple applications including Wikipedia. I hope to work directly with the Wikipedia community more and will start by listing my classroom’s contributions to Wikipedia here.

Outside of teaching, I am an Emmy-winning media producer, represented by the artist collective Fractured Atlas, and a graduate of the NYU film school.