User:Michaelacaulfield

My professional expertise in digital literacy, news literacy, educational technology, instructional design, and collaborative software. My first educational technology project was in 1997, getting composition students to write biographies of obscure people for web publication. I still enjoy writing missing biographies and getting students to do the same. I have been teaching faculty and students how to use wiki and Wikipedia in education for over a decade.

I do bloggy-blog things at Hapgood.

Newspapers on Wikipedia Project
I am working on an project to create and improve Wikipedia pages about local news sources. The idea behind the project is to improve the usefulness of Wikipedia in judging source credibility, and to build awareness of local newspaper history and culture more generally. In the U.S. alone we estimate that about 3,000 significant local news sources do not have Wikipedia pages detailing basic facts about these sources, often making it impossible to judge if one is looking at a “real” or “fake” news source, independent or corporate media.

Wikipedia and my job
I don't do any paid work on Wikipedia and am not paid to edit any articles. There is nothing in my job duties as assigned that requires me to edit Wikipedia. I don't have any grants to do editing work on Wikipedia.

As the leader of a large digital literacy initiative, I do run a project that is trying (as one of its goals) to get students, faculty, and citizens involved in editing Wikipedia articles (see below). As part of that project I try to model practice for students and faculty by participating in the project, which is sometimes done on work hours. I also sometimes edit articles on work hours to build my competence in editing and familiarity with issues in editing. This helps me in teaching students and faculty how to use and edit Wikipedia.