Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Los Medanos College /Integrated Reading, Writing, and Critical Thinking (Fall )

Students are introduced to college level reading, writing and critical thinking skills and are given practice in developing them. Students will learn skills for reading passages of various lengths and styles, techniques for improving comprehension and retention and guidelines for writing effective lively paragraphs and academic, thesis-driven essays. This course uses the whole language, metacognitive approach for improving reading, critical thinking and writing skills which students need to succeed in college.

Week 1

 * Overview of the course
 * Introduction to how Wikipedia will be used in the course
 * Understanding Wikipedia as a community, we'll discuss its expectations and etiquette.

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Handout: Editing Wikipedia


 * Create an account and then complete the online training for students. During this training, you will make edits in a sandbox and learn the basic rules of Wikipedia.

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Resources: Online Training for Students

Week 2

 * Review pages 4-7 of the Evaluating Wikipedia brochure. This will give you a good, brief overview of what to look for in other articles, and what other people will look for in your own.
 * Evaluate an existing Wikipedia article related to the class, and leave suggestions for improving it on the article's talk page.
 * A few questions to consider (don't feel limited to these):
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference?
 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Is there any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in the article?
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?

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Resources: Evaluating Wikipedia,

Week 3
Select articles that you'll be contributing to

Week 4

 * Add 1–2 sentences of new information, backed up with a citation to an appropriate source, to a Wikipedia article related to the class.