Some professors believe Wikipedia has no place in the footnotes of a college paper. But could it have a place on the syllabus? The Wikimedia Foundation , the nonprofit organization that does fundraising and back-end support for the popular open-source encyclopedia, says yes. So do the nine professors at prominent colleges who have agreed to make creating, augmenting, and editing Wikipedia entries part of their students’ coursework. “We’ve known for a long time that students are the fuel of Wikipedia,” said LiAnna Davis, a Wikimedia spokeswoman. “{hellip}We feel there is a place for Wikipedia in the classroom.” ON THE WEB: A stand against Wikipedia MORE FROM INSIDE HIGHER ED: Research methods ‘beyond Google’ “Students have access to so many journals and library materials and other scholarly materials that other people just don’t have access to,” she said. Wikimedia’s new alliances with professors stem from its Public Policy Initiative, an effort to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of topics relating to U.S. public policy. On a grant from the Stanton Foundation, Wikimedia started recruiting public policy professors who were willing to have their students create content for Wikipedia. This fall, the foundation will help nine instructors — four at George Washington University , two at Georgetown University , and one each at Indiana University at Bloomington, Syracuse University , and Harvard University — integrate Wikipedia-related assignments into their syllabuses. (Wikimedia does not pay the professors to do this; the Stanton grant pays for foundation staff and training associated with the project.) “The social media trend is something that students have definitely latched on to, and regardless of what everyone else thinks, they’re going to continue to be involved with it,” says Carol Ann Dwyer, a public affairs instructor at Syracuse , who is among Wikimedia’s academic recruits. “I would prefer, particularly if they’re going to become ‘Wikipedians,’ that they do it properly.” The foundation also recruited student “ambassadors” at those colleges to serve as on-campus resources for professors and students who might be less familiar with the technical aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. It gathered the ambassadors in Washington this summer for three days of training. The foundation also recruited “online ambassadors” — experienced Wikipedia users from around the world — to serve as a second line of support, especially for students who might need help while burning the midnight oil the night before a due date. The particular ways the professors are planning to work Wikipedia into their courses vary. The graduate students in Peter Linquiti’s policy analysis course at George Washington will be asked to pen a detailed critique of an existing entry, assessing its “credibility, intended audience, currency of content, degree of support for the information and analysis, use of policy analysis tools or concepts, extent of balance and/or bias, and any recommended changes to content, style, and tone,” according to a summary provided to Wikimedia. They will then submit appropriate edits to the entry, and then monitor those edits for a week to see what happens to those changes in the fray of editing and counter-editing that is a common byproduct of the site’s wild-west revisions policy. Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor in the school of foreign service at Georgetown, says contributing to Wikipedia dovetails nicely with the sort of literature review and summarizing that she already has students do as part of preparing to write an argumentative paper. Davis says she plans to simply have the students in two of her classes format those summaries for Wikipedia, submit them to the site, then use that as a jumping-off point for writing a proper research paper. In this way, the process mirrors a strategy already employed by many college students, only in reverse: Instead of starting with a Wikipedia page as a nexus to find more authoritative material, the students would do research first, then consolidate their findings into a concise entry on the site. “I’m tired of my grad students saying, ‘All we ever do is critique and discuss and deconstruct,’ ” Davis says. “So I’m going to make them create something that’s not just a thing for me to read; it’s going to go out into the community.” The fact that summarizing for Wikipedia comes with the pressure of knowing others might read and rely on their work might even prompt students to be more meticulous than they might have if the summaries were for Davis’s eyes only, she says. Several other people involved with the project made the same point. The tower and the crowd Academe historically has viewed Wikipedia, which allows any visitor to edit its entries and relies on the vigilance of volunteer fact-checkers, with a great deal of ambivalence. In 2007, the history department at Middlebury College took a stand against citing Wikipedia entries directly in papers, and many others have worried that Wikipedia sows the same moral hazard in students as Google by enabling, by virtue of its breadth and convenience, lazy research habits. A study published earlier this year in the online journal First Monday reported that more than half of college students use Wikipedia at some point in the research process either all or most of the time (though their professors might be relieved to hear that 70% of those students use it at or near the beginning of their research). In recent years, academics seem to have gotten used to Wikipedia being around (and have perhaps recognized its efforts to keep out bad information), and much of the discussion has shifted to how it can be applied constructively. The professors who have partnered with Wikimedia’s Public Policy Initiative are not the first to incorporate Wikipedia into their courses — the foundation counts 59 such instances between 2007 and 2009 — and academics have certainly played a role in helping build and edit the site since it opened in 2001. The initiative does, however, represent the first time the foundation has pushed to seed a community of contributors within higher education. “This is exciting to be sure!” wrote Curtis J. Bonk, a professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana and author of The World Is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education , in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. “That is a key part the mission of all of us in a higher education setting — to generate as well as disseminate knowledge in different disciplines,” Bonk wrote. “Given that Wikipedia is now central to the knowledge dissemination process as well as the linkages between content and fields, such partnerships are make sense.” But for as much that the academic cloisters and the ?ber-democratic site might have to offer each other, there remains intractable philosophical tension between the two that could foil the collaboration. Linquiti’s exercise of having students track the changes made to their entries by the equally empowered masses hints at the vulnerability of their contributions. The mutability of Wikipedia entries is why Neil Waters, a history professor at Middlebury, still forbids his students from citing them. In its guidelines, Waters points out, Wikipedia instructs visitors to “Be bold in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes” — hardly a scholarly protocol, he argues. “I want my students to worry about making mistakes, and to learn how to avoid them, and how to take responsibility for what they write,” wrote Waters in an e-mail. Alan Liu, chair of the English department at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of the popular academic blog Voice of the Shuttle, noted the importance of resolving these process issues if academe wants to make its authoritative voice louder in Wikipedia. “The academic community provides a constrained and relatively standard set of protocols for constructive collaboration and refereeing that could be built on (whereas the larger global community behind Wikipedia was more problematic because there is actually no such thing as a global community with sufficiently shared motives and standards of collaboration),” wrote Liu in an e-mail. Much remains to be hashed out between academics and the general public as far as working out such “standards of collaboration,” he said, to resolve the tension between the academic value of peer review and the social media value of crowd-sourcing. “New policies, institutional arrangements, practices, protocols, and technologies will need to be created on both sides of the divide” — between higher education and the “foundations of networked public knowledge” such as Wikipedia and Google — “to create productive and socially-good ways for experts and the crowd to teach, and learn from, each other,” said Liu.” As a handful of loose alliances between Wikimedia and professors, the project “does not seem complete enough.” Wikimedia says it plans to recruit 15 more professors by the spring, and hopes to expand the collaborations beyond public policy eventually. “We are trying to develop a model, a body of documentation, and some technical tools and Wikipedia community processes that will be useful around the globe and in a variety of topic areas; and we hope to set into motion something that will be self-sustaining by volunteer and academic groups,” Frank Schulenberg, head of public outreach at Wikimedia, wrote in a statement. “While we are working only with U.S.-based public policy programs during the pilot program, we will also be continually seeking opportunities to engage our Wikimedia chapters, professors, students, and Wikipedians in other parts of the world and in other topic areas.”

Since first lady Michelle Obama planted a garden at the White House in the spring of 2009 and invited schoolchildren to help tend and harvest the produce, more school gardens have been sprouting up across the country. Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announces it will award $1 million in grants for eligible high-poverty schools to start community gardens. The goal: to teach students about gardening and nutrition and to provide fresh produce for school meals. Some of the harvest may also be given to students’ families, as well as to local food banks and senior-center nutrition programs (www.fns.usda.gov). Improving nutrition in schools is part of the first lady’s Let’s Move! initiative to fight childhood obesity. OBAMA’S PROJECT: More on the Let’s Move! campaign SCHOOL LUNCHES: Chefs help make them healthier LATEST NEWS: Keep up with fitness and nutrition developments School gardens “give kids exposure to where food comes from and encourages them to try foods they might not otherwise try,” says Kevin Concannon, USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services. They give teachers an opportunity to talk about soil, water, sun, health and science, and the gardens can be used for math and art programs, he says. Concannon has visited school gardens from Maine to Missouri to California. When a second-grade girl took him on a tour of her elementary school’s 2-acre garden in Riverside, Calif., she waxed eloquent about strawberries, he says, pointing out that they contain vitamin C. “This was music to my ears,” he says. Estimates suggest that about 15% to 20% of schools across the country have gardens, says Mike Metallo, president of the National Gardening Association, a non-profit group that provides gardeners and teachers with information and resources. Since 1982, the gardening association has given out 9,310 grants and awards worth $3.7 million, reaching 1.4 million young gardeners, he says (kidsgardening.org). “We’ve supported everything from small herb gardens at inner-city elementary schools to large, raised-bed vegetable gardens in middle schools,” Metallo says. The group is taking applications for its youth gardening programs, which are financed by corporations. “In most areas of the country, schools can do a spring garden and fall garden and get parents, kids and community volunteers to maintain them throughout the summer,” Metallo says. The gardening association also provides money for indoor gardening projects with light tables and curriculum, he says. “It teaches students about roots and stems and the process that is going on. A lot of times, they can grow lettuce and herbs quite easily. “Kids love to plant seeds. They love to watch them sprout and grow. It’s magical.”

LOS ANGELES — When state budget cuts imperiled city schools, a group of parents fought back by enlisting Hollywood stars to spread a message targeting one of their own, Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggar . The satirical video featuring actors Megan Fox and fiancee Brian Austin Green highlights how funding shortfalls have killed jobs for librarians, nurses, translators, janitors and teachers. While the video was filmed in the affluent hills above Hollywood where Green’s son attends Wonderland Avenue Elementary School, the cuts are more deeply felt at an inner-city school like Markham Middle School. Both schools have been highlighted as the Los Angeles Unified School District has grappled with $1.5 billion in budget cuts and nearly 3,000 teacher layoffs during the past two years. But comparing the two schools shows a remarkably uneven impact, and just how much depends on factors ranging from income and parent involvement to teacher tenure. The state’s education funding crisis, now entering its third school year, only promises to widen the breech between the haves and have-nots in the nation’s second-largest school district. Nestled in leafy, secluded Laurel Canyon, Wonderland is more than just a top school in the city — it’s one of the best in the state. In addition to the video that has been viewed more than one million times, Wonderland second graders were featured on CNN writing to Schwarzenegger to protest budget cuts. Serving gang-plagued Watts and two of the city’s largest housing projects, Markham is one of the city’s lowest performers with test scores 34% below the acceptable mark. The ACLU sued the school system this spring charging that Markham students weren’t learning from substitutes who replaced laid-off teachers. Schwarzenegger himself held up Markham as an example of how the teacher tenure system backfires because layoffs disproportionately strike younger teachers eager to work in the inner-city. The two schools have been long divided by more than freeways. The year before Tim Sullivan became Markham principal two years ago, 142 students were arrested around the 1,500-pupil campus. The assistant principal went to prison for sexually abusing female students. To keep kids safe on their way to school and maintain Markham free of gang graffiti, Sullivan decided to meet regularly with local gang leaders. “This isn’t the place for the weak and fainthearted,” said the 43-year-old principal. A more basic problem was finding teachers. Sullivan didn’t get a single inquiry at district job fairs so he recruited recent graduates keen for the challenge at annual salaries averaging $45,000. When budget cuts rolled around last year, Markham lost half its teaching staff — 35 teachers — because they hadn’t reached tenure. They were replaced by substitutes at a daily salary of $173 — more than a fulltime probationary teacher earns, but without benefits. In some cases, the subs served as little more than babysitters. Several gave all students a C grade because they didn’t have enough schoolwork to grade adequately, according to the ACLU lawsuit. Another 34 teachers, including 10 long-term subs, got pink slips this year, spurring the ACLU’s successful injunction to halt the layoffs. “A high moral calling can only last so long before you feel like the butt of a joke,” said English teacher Nicholas Melvoin, who was laid off last year but returned as a long-term substitute. The layoffs have stripped the curriculum to basics, without electives. Markham’s plight drew the attention of Schwarzenegger, who used the school as backdrop to announce his support of tenure reform that would allow schools flexibility in layoffs. Across town, Wonderland Principal Don Wilson’s problems are far different. A pile of resumes sits on his desk for a job opening next year. Electives are not subject to district funding whims. The school has full-time art, music and gym teachers, plus teaching assistants for each teacher, paid for by parents through the PTA’s fundraising nonprofit, which raises $350,000 a year. Boosters have paid for elaborate playgrounds, cutting-edge equipment in classrooms, field trips and professional development for teachers. But Wilson must work to keep that revenue flowing. He spent a recent Saturday night in a tent on the playground to help raise $500 per child in a sleepover fundraiser. “You become a developer,” Wilson said. “That’s a huge part of what I do here.” Parents are asked to contribute $700 a year per child and many donate more in cash and other initiatives such as buying mugs embossed with children’s art work. “Parents really value the public school opportunity because they’re not paying the big tuition bill,” said PTA President Terri Levy as she organized an appreciation event to provide breakfast, lunch and a car wash for each teacher. Wilson knows he’s fortunate, although he, too, has lost personnel and is down to having a nurse only one day per week at his 550-pupil school. The principal, who spent much of his career in the sprawling city’s more urban schools, said suburban and inner-city parents want the same for the children. But Wonderland parents possess not only a huge amount of resources, including those to make the slickly produced video opposing cuts, they also have high expectations. That’s the key difference, Wilson said. “They bring expectations as to what an education should be,” he said. “At other schools, parents and teachers come with a limited vision of high expectations.” Markham’s Sullivan doesn’t begrudge more affluent schools in the district. He does wish the system was more equitable. “Just give us an even playing field to show what we can really do,” he said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

FORT VALLEY, Ga. — During the school year, Mondays in this rural Georgia community are for video games, trips to grandma’s house and hanging out at the neighborhood community center. Don’t bother showing up for school. The doors are locked and the lights are off. Peach County is one of more than 120 school districts across the country where students attend school just four days a week, a cost-saving tactic gaining popularity among cash-strapped districts struggling to make ends meet. The 4,000-student district started shaving a day off its weekly school calendar last year to help fill a $1 million budget shortfall. It was that or lay off 39 teachers the week before school started, said Superintendent Susan Clark. “We’re treading water,” Clark said as she stood outside the headquarters of her seven-school district. “There was nothing else for us to do.” The results? Test scores went up. So did attendance — for both students and teachers. The district is spending one-third of what it once did on substitute teachers, Clark said. And the graduation rate likely will be more than 80% for the first time in years, Clark said. The four days that students are in school are slightly longer and more crowded with classes and activities. After school, students can get tutoring in subjects where they’re struggling. On their off day, students who don’t have other options attend “Monday care” at area churches and the local Boys & Girls Club, where tutors are also available to help with homework. The programs generally cost a few dollars a day per student. Experts say research is scant on the effect of a four-day school week on student performance. In fact, there is mostly just anecdotal evidence in reports on the trend with little scientific data to back up what many districts say, said University of Southern Maine researcher Christine Donis-Keller. “The broadest conclusion you can draw is that it doesn’t hurt academics,” said Donis-Keller, who is with the university’s Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation. Many districts that have the shortened schedule say they’ve seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance. But others say that not only did they not save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren’t in class enough and didn’t have enough contact with teachers. The school district in Marlow, Okla., is switching back to a five-day week after administrators decided students were not being served well by attending school only four days. The 440-student district tried the shorter week the spring semester this year to save $25,000 in operation costs. “It was harder on the teachers. We were asking the kids to move at a quicker pace,” said district Superintendent Bennie Newton. “We’re hoping the four-day week won’t come into play next year.” The move by Peach County in Georgia gets mixed reviews. Parents like Heather Bradshaw worry that their children are getting shortchanged on time with teachers. “I don’t feel like they’re having the necessary time in the classroom,” said Bradshaw, a single mother with a fourth-grade son at one of the county’s three elementary schools. “The schedule has slowed him down.” Other parents prefer the shorter schedule and don’t mind the hassle of finding a babysitter one day a week. “It makes the children’s weekend a little better, so they get more rest,” said LaKeisha Johnson, who sends her fourth-grade daughter to the Boys & Girls Club on Mondays. The trend of four-day school weeks started in New Mexico during the oil crisis of the 1970s and has been popular in rural states where students have to commute a long way. Other districts have used it as a way to try to fix schools with a long history of poor student performance by shaking up the schedule and giving children more time to study outside of school. Georgia, Oklahoma and Maine have changed their laws in the last couple of years to allow districts to count their school year by hours rather than days, allowing for a four-day week if needed. Hawaii schools were off every other Friday this year for schools to save money, giving them the state with the shortest school year in the country. From California to Minnesota to New York, districts — mostly small, rural ones with less than 5,000 students — are following the trend, hoping to rescue their bleeding budgets. For Peach County, the four-day week was enough of a success that the school district is trying it again next year, Clark said. The move saves $400,000 annually and is popular among teachers and students because they get extra rest, she said “Teachers tell me they are much more focused because they’ve had time to prepare. They don’t have kids sleeping in class on Tuesday,” she said. “Everything has taken on a laser-light focus.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.