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Two dozen universities now have courses where students are working on Wikipedia as part of their formal coursework. Many of those campuses have "Wikipedia ambassadors" tasked with helping professors weave writing and editing Wikipedia entries into the syllabus. Even Ferriero's office at the National Archives and Records Administration now employs a "Wikipedian in residence" in charge of fostering relationships with galleries, libraries, archives and museums.

Interesting! If it is a good piece of work,it doesn't matter whether it is judged by one professor/public. It does matter what students learn during the process and how they can improve their work further.

a major sociological perspective worth looking at

"Gaia Education promotes a holistic approach to education for sustainable development by developing curricula for sustainable community design. While drawing upon best practices within ecovillages worldwide, Gaia Education works in partnership with universities, ecovillages, government and non-government agencies and the United Nations. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis I suggest you J-M to read the critics part, where we can see a "nice" example of tension between religion and science (just to connect to some previous topic) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology this is also very interesting to read when it comes to the principles of sustainable development

thank you for the link to deep ecology, "a contemporary ecological philosophy that claims to recognize the inherent worth of other beings aside from their utility. The philosophy emphasizes the interdependent nature of human and non-human life as well as the importance of the ecosystem and natural processes. It provides a foundation for the environmental, ecology and green movements and has fostered a new system of environmental ethics."

"An empirical analysis of the creation, use and adoption of social computing applications IPTS exploratory research on the socio-economic impact of social computing Over the last few years, the take-up of social computing applications has been impressive. These digital applications are defined as those that enable interaction, collaboration and sharing between users. They include applications for blogging, podcasting, collaborative content (e.g. Wikipedia), social networking e.g. MySpace, Facebook, multimedia sharing (e.g. Flickr, YouTube), social tagging (e.g. Deli.cio.us) and social gaming (e.g. Second Life). The importance of social computing has been acknowledged by European policy makers. It is considered to be a potentially disruptive Information Society development, in which users play an increasingly influential role in the way products and services are shaped and used. This may have important social and economic impacts on all aspects of society. There is, however, little scientific evidence on the take-up and impact of social computing applications. The objective of this report is to provide a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing application areas: blogging, podcasting, collaborative content, social networking multimedia sharing, social tagging and social gaming. In addition, the report offers a definition of social computing in order to clarify what is meant, in the face of many different angles, and points to the new area of mobile social computing. The dynamics of user participation in social computing are also discussed. Finally, extensive empirical data is presented in the Annex to this report. Research into social computing presents numerous challenges. Social computing is a moving target, with rapidly evolving technologies, markets and user behaviours, all of which have emerged and developed over just a few years. The measurement issue is a crucial, in particular in the context of policy imp

Thank you for sharing; not only does this article seem very interesting but I am also always happy to find sites that offer free articles for me to read.