November 29, 2007
Just call her Wikipedia wonk: UWB prof in spotlight for guiding students through online editing process
Maybe you’ve read about Martha Groom. An associate professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at UW Bothell, she won some media attention recently for involving her students with Wikipedia, the publicly edited online encyclopedia.
It’s innovative teaching, to be sure. Groom is an ecologist and a conservation biologist who says she loves “stomping around in nature” — but she is a teacher above all.
“I love teaching,” she said. “I love watching the lights come on, the ‘a-hah’ moment, which they construct.” She likes where she works, too, saying it’s UW Bothell’s atmosphere of support and open exchange that makes ideas like her wiki project possible.
She is also quick to credit Andreas Brockhaus, UW Bothell’s director of educational technology, for encouraging the faculty to use wikis and blogs in their courses and for providing help to Groom and her students.
Groom has taught at UW Bothell and the Seattle campus — she has an adjunct appointment in biology — since 1998, when she came to the UW from North Carolina State University. She also has worked at the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica and as a visiting lecturer at The University of California-Davis. She is married to Daniel Grunbaum, a UW associate professor of oceanography, and they have fraternal twin boys who are almost 6.
Groom also is co-director of the Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy, a graduate teaching fellowship at Bothell. She teaches courses on conservation biology, restoration ecology, sustainable development and other environmental issues. And it was while creating a class on environmental history and globalization for the fall of 2006 that she thought of asking students to post their work on Wikipedia.
“I contacted Andreas about the idea and he helped me develop the assignment to be sure students had the support they needed to complete the work,” Groom said. “And we took full advantage of the nuances that such an assignment affords.”
Nuances that in some ways make Wikipedia, with its open-ended public editing, a sort of microcosm of the academic world of peer review. And like scholarly work, Wikipedia needs an objective, neutral tone and appropriate citations to establish facts.
Groom said she drew up topics herself for the students to choose from, after examining Wikipedia’s entries on a number of subjects and finding some that needed clarification or even new entries. Deforestation during the Roman period was one topic, for instance; another was the Americanization of native Americans. In some cases, the entries submitted by Groom’s students stand as fact in the online encyclopedia. The Wikipedia assignment represented 60 percent of the students’ grades. For later classes she has changed that to 40 percent.
Some of the students were intimidated at first, Groom said. After all, Wikipedia commands a worldwide audience — and a famously picky one at that.
“I was honored and terrified because I am quite computer illiterate,” wrote former student Sigrid Crompe in an e-mail remembering a class called Conservation and Sustainability in Africa, which Groom taught last spring. “The experience allowed me an opportunity to overcome my fear and to recognize that I was capable of accomplishing this task.”
Crompe said she did her class project on indoor air pollution in developing nations as a result of burning biomass for domestic energy. “My questions were never-ending and caused me anxiety in finding credible sources for my information,” Crompe wrote. “Because I had come to the conclusion from her assigned readings that misinformation was part of the problem in the first place.”
Student Neil Gould said he tended to put more thought into his Wikipedia assignment than into a regular paper “due to the ‘pressure’ to bring something credible to a potential huge audience.”
Another challenge was in entering the somewhat wild world of wiki-style editing. “It was one of those things where you don’t know specifically what will happen,” said Brockhaus. “They were entering into this anonymous community; there are benefits and negatives. You don’t know how you’re going to be treated once you get out there.”
The concern was not unfounded. The eager public editors of Wikipedia were not always polite when they suggested — or in many cases simply made — changes to the entries posted by the students. “There was some derogatory language,” Groom said. She intervened, reminding the Wikipedia critics that the project was a work in progress involving students, and the inappropriate comments stopped.
The students adapted to the Wikipedia editing model, many rewriting and recrafting their original entries based on the feedback.
It was not until this fall, however, that Groom’s classroom Wikipedia experience began to get more outside attention. A writer for Inside Higher Education took notice when Groom and Brockhaus discussed the Wiki project at an education conference in October. The resulting article, “When Wikipedia is the Assignment,” sparked several comments and requests for more information to Groom, who called the sudden attention “flattering, and bewildering.”
Soon followed stories by the Chronicle for Higher Education, the Associated Press and the UW Daily, and requests for about a half dozen more interviews. “I’ve received about 60 e-mails from people around the world offering their experiences and advice, their praise, or asking for advice and help in doing the same kind of project,” Groom said. And of course, the blogosphere is achatter. “There are all kinds of blog postings out there on the project,” Groom said, “some of them way off the mark, and a lot that are not, and all kinds of discussion in between. It has been interesting!”
Asking students to make Wikipedia entries worked out well last fall and spring, and Groom said she “absolutely” plans to continue using the process in future classes. “I think it can help bring into relief many elements of good scholarship,” she said. “It is not for all my courses, but it fits with the learning objectives I have for my students in a number of courses.”
Has the project changed her view of Wikipedia, the pervasive but much-maligned first research stop for many Internet users?
“It has made me both a bigger fan and a skeptic simultaneously,” she said. “Certainly, many articles are still inaccurate, misleading, poorly researched, and most commonly, too short to offer very much of interest. And just as certainly, many articles are well researched, and often also well written.”
She added, “To me, it really does fit the stated goal of being an evolving work in that it is what the community wishes it to be, through their own investment of time.”
Student Crompe said the class project was “a bit time-consuming but to have it completed was personally satisfying.” She called the class “one of the most profound experiences in academia I have had to date.”
Gould, for his part, said, “even though I’m a business graduate, I still take pride in what we did, even if only a few people really read and learn about the subject matter.”
Groom said she’ll review the many e-mails and comments she got on the Wikipedia projects next time she constructs such an assignment.
Brockhaus and Groom both say they appreciate the interdisciplinary nature of the UW Bothell community. Brockhaus said, “One of the things I really enjoy… is the collaboration that happens between faculty and academic services such as librarians, and people like me — really interested in trying to figure out how to enhance learning for students.”
Groom said, “UWB attracts creative, passionate teachers, so the fact that I came up with this and ran with the idea is not an accident. I don’t know if I would have done this without being at UWB.”
