User:Profmwilliams/Education noticeboard

Request for course instructor right: Profmwilliams (talk)
Monica Williams
 * Name

Weber State University
 * Institution

Policing: History, Theory, and Practice
 * Course title and description

The course is a lower-division, undergraduate course that provides an introduction to policing in the United States. What role do police serve in contemporary society? How has that role changed over time? How and why do some police officers engage in corruption? What are the causes and consequences of police use of force? We will discuss the answers to these questions, focusing particularly on how race, politics, and the nature of police organizations contribute to modern policing. The Wikipedia assignment will be a major component of their grade and I'm currently recruiting an online ambassador (or two) to help with the assignment. I have written HTML code in the past, but I've never edited a Wikipedia page.

We will follow the assignment outlined in the sample 12-week syllabus in the Wikimedia Foundation materials. Students will work in pairs (but each student will have an individual user name) and each pair will choose a page to work on from a list that I provide. This assignment will replace paper assignments that I've used in previous semesters. My goal is to have students take ownership of a piece of publicly accessible writing in order to improve their writing and synthesis skills. There are a lot of policing-related pages that need work on Wikipedia, so they'll be contributing to the community rather than writing a paper that only I will read.
 * Assignment plan

20 (working in pairs, so they'll be editing 10 different pages)
 * Number of students

August 25, 2014 through December 8, 2014
 * Start and end dates

--Profmwilliams (talk) 20:43, 29 July 2014 (UTC)


 * this is a well thought-out proposal. It will require a good deal of help from a local or online ambassador who can help with the the "unwritten" rules and common traps that abound in Wikipedia. Rjensen (talk) 02:52, 30 July 2014 (UTC)