User talk:61.47.105.130

January 2011

Hi, thank you for your edits on alternative. They are identified as editing tests and are removed. If you wish to test, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Hydriz (talk) 12:50, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

To D. Hurst

Personally, I think it's a great idea for teachers to bring their students here and have them edit, but, (and these are my personal feelings, not rules),

1. The teachers should begin by making an account, introducing themselves, and explaining what they're going to be doing.
2. The teachers should practice and become familiar with the norms and expectations of the community.
3. Students should similarly make an account, and introduce themselves as connected to their teacher. At least, the teacher should ID the IP address from which their students will be editing.
4. Students should be trained by their teacher, starting in the sandbox.
5. The teacher should alert the community before a group of students goes live, giving us some indication of when they will start and finish.
6. Once students begin making real edits, these should be carefully patrolled by the teacher.
7. When the editing session is finished, the teacher should clean up any mess the students have left behind.

Unfortunately, last week, your students (I assume) came in here without really knowing what they were doing and mostly made a mess. We're a small community and are not able to effectively deal with a large number of low-quality edits, so I ended up reverting most of what they had done, a waste of their time and mine.

If you would like to discuss the issue of a collocations section, please do so here.--Brett (talk) 12:48, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

To Brett

I am the Technology Coordinator at D. Hurst school and have been helping her with this project. To your points above

1. I created an account and introduced myself to the community two weeks before students started posting. I even asked questions about uploading images and told the community that we were going to have some students adding value to some of the word entries as a vocabulary lesson. The community seemed to embrace the idea.
2. The teacher, students, and myself practiced and learned the wiki coding in the sandbox area. We talked about expectations and creating content that would help others learn the words as well.
3. All our students did create accounts and are identified. D. Hurst follows all the edits that students make and spot checks them as they have been working on the words. It's becoming increasingly difficult as people are reverting edits faster than students/teachers can check/chat and update the edits. As for IP addresses like most schools we use a Proxy so all edits come from 1 IP address...unless the students decided to work from home.
4. We did an 80 minute session getting to know the wiki, playing in the sandbox and looking at the layout of pages.
5. Students are making edits in and out of class. I think this is a pretty unfair statement. These kids are 17 and 18 years old and even though we're teaching them vocabulary by working with them on these words if they decided to do it not connected to the school they still could. I believe the whole idea of this community/project was to get people involved in creating content together?
6. What makes a community like this great is we're all responsible for the mess...students can help each other, other community members can come in and help with some of the coding. What's frustrating us at this point is community members don't seem to be looking and evaluating the content. They are looking at the format and then undoing the edits. Formatting is a minor fix when trying to create an amazing site like this. If the content is not appropriate, fair enough, but good content is getting undone because undoing is easier than fixing.

Our students have been working for a good couple of weeks now...so last week would have been the 3rd week of this project and we've got a couple more weeks to go.

When we were looking for a community where we could help English Language Students A) Learn English B) Join a supportive community and C) add value back to the world we thought that this community project was perfect. It's sad to see that a site intended to help people learn English won't support these students who are learning English to add value back. Sure edits might not be perfect, formatting might be a bit off...but they are adding value and at the same time learning how to edit a wiki. These kids have a whole life ahead of them and the skill of learning how to edit a wiki now might allow them to add value on other wikis/communities as they grow.

I think what frustrates me most Mr. Brett is that according to your profile you're a TESOL teacher. This is a learning activity and we're all learning together in this project. Personally I think it's great that we have students who are trying to learn English adding value to a resource they can use throughout the rest of their schooling. Jutecht (talk) 01:47, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Ideas and Suggestions

1. If someone would like to Skype with our class to talk to them about proper formatting of the wiki pages we're up for that. We're GMT +7 (Bangkok, Thailand)
2. Our students have been adding some images to pages as research shows that you can learn and retain vocabulary better if you can associate it with an image. We've taught our students to use only Creative Commons images and as they have added some images to different words they are being pulled. I think the community should consider the idea of allowing images that help represent words being used in a sentence.
3. Our students spend one class period a week working on words on this Wiki. The project will be going on for about another two weeks. We appreciate everyones support and let us know if there is something particular you would like the student to work on or correct.

Jutecht (talk) 01:47, 4 March 2011 (UTC)