Dr. Margaret Vendreys (Part 1)

Transcript

Greet Van Belle:
And actually with the arts, Margaret. Do you want to pick up from there?

Margaret Vendreys:
I actually thought of using Wikipedia for my class independently like I didn't know that Wiki EDU existed. But I knew that I had been for a long time because I wrote a book and that artist page has always been wrong. And I got to the point where I was completely frustrated about going back in and fixing things that people went in at fixed again and that kind of thing. So I am definitely one of those faculty members who will not allow students to cite Wikipedia and I have not changed my mind about that, for that very reason. I don't have a problem with them using it as a springboard to find citation sources that kind of thing. But I will not let them quote Wikipedia. The thing that made this particular class work with Wikipedia was because I was going to have the students writing about works of art on campus it's an African American art class. There are about six significant pieces by significant African American artists list. All of them have Wikipedia pages. None of them have this particular work of art on their pages. So the students were to do their research, they were to make sure the page that existed was correct and that the sources that were cited were useful sources. Then they were to write about the piece here and then find where it fits in into the page that already exists, and then link it to the page that York College has because Wikipedia wouldn't let us put on any of our photos in the comments. Because they said it was public art and there’s spaces around it and people around it and whatever, and there's copyright issues. But we could link to the York College site that has the image of the work. So I think that's what made students get a little bit more up right about what they were doing because they were bringing the college into these important artists' profiles. And they were proud of what they did. They were proud, they were happy to be editing somebody else's work. And going "Is this date right? Is this place right? Is this the right place this artist went to school?" That kind of thing. They felt invested in what the end product would look like.

Greet Van Belle:
And empowered.

Margaret Vendreys:
Right, but the thing is someone else can go in and change it, and that’s something else they had to deal with the fact that their hard work could indeed be edited later on. They were aware that they could track their own and so history, and so could I. And now they are editors. They can log in and do other work in Wikipedia as well. So they become sort of special, they feel really special. I would do it again. I would, I would do it again, for sure.