Looking through my Zotero library, I found a series of essays by Aaron Swartz, written back in 2006. I added these essays years ago, before I know who Swartz was. I heard about him (mostly on Twitter) only in the last year couple years, first regarding the JSTOR lawsuit and then about his tragic suicide.
Last week I posted about an assignment in my Romanticism class, part of which requires students to add to Wikipedia’s glossary of literary terms, a potentially useful but mostly empty list. Thanks to my students, the list is now significantly less empty than it was a few months ago. I’m generally pleased with the assignment.
Last semester, in a seminar on Charles Dickens, I assigned students to update a Wikipedia page for a Dickens character. I briefly discussed the assignment on this blog in December, putting my own assignment in the context of other professors who have used Wikipedia in their classes in various ways. The exercise worked well for