It is easy to take
Wikipedia for granted at this point in mid-2012: it is a thriving repository of information that started in 2001 and (as of right now) has over four million articles in English. Adding pages is relatively easy, and the community edits and links and updates these pages as necessary. How does such a resource begin, though? The
oldest entries and edits in the nascent Wikipedia, in January 2001, were apparently entries including simple lists of female tennis players and a short entry on the American philosopher William Alston. Those two entries are probably not related by logic, but by the users of Wikipedia at the time (very few!).
So, as the brave students of GENE 3000H at the University of Georgia undertake generating the resource found here, we have a similar problem but on a more focused subject: how evolution intersects with climate change. The
first paper was assigned last week, and although today's discussion proceeded as usual with a small class of bright students (mostly call-and-response between professor and students; I'm trying to encourage more cross-talk and bickering), there were only 2 entries from students on the wiki this morning. One was an orphaned page on migration, one was a summary of another paper a student had read. Good effort, but not yet useful. How do we start?
This was what we asked ourselves as we started discussion of today's paper,
an excellent one on how terrestrial and marine ectotherms track temperature change. Should we restate the goals of this class in a clear way? And what is the most salient thing we learn from this paper, so that it can be the point of
nucleation for a much larger creation? We answered these questions in class, and then I realized another barrier to getting things started, something all of us scientists can recognize. Even if the task of editing the wiki and adding a single sentence is extremely easy, taking less than 30 seconds, to tell a group of 15 people to do that means it is nobody's individual responsibility, and thus it doesn't get done.
Thus at the end of class two brave volunteers were assigned the task of seeding the wiki with these two things: a statement of purpose, and what we learned today. Five hours later, I checked in and love what I see! By the time I'm done writing this blog post there will probably be more development, because already students are re-organizing, providing links, adding content, fleshing this sucker out! Remember, I'm not steering this ship. These undergraduate students, most of whom have only had exposure to evolutionary biology through introductory biology courses and five lectures of my 200-person class; exposure to climate change biology only through mainstream media; and exposure to marine biology only as trips to the beach....are putting together a resource that I think is not just going to be interesting to me, but a useful resource for all of us interested in the topic (as well as potentially an exploration of wikis as a teaching tool).
So, I've asked the
SeaMonster folks to link you in our direction so you can watch the experiment unfold. You can't edit the wiki; only my class can do that, it is a closed community in that regard. However, comments or suggestions are welcome (but will be moderated), and I'll try to come back to SeaMonster later in the semester to update everybody on how it is going. A wiki can't save the world, but maybe... just maybe... it will help guide me toward some ideas for my next grant proposal :)
-JPW
Evolution and Climate Change in the Oceans
Comments
Pretend Guy (unauthenticated)
Sep 4, 2012
Just checking out the comments section and how they are moderated.