User talk:Ppowers29

test

Hello

Hi,

• I'm bobrayner, and I'd like to help out with your course. If you have any questions, just ask...
• Please bear in mind that creating a new article can be a lot harder for new editors, compared to just improving an existing article.
• What's the schedule - when does work start? Do you have a list of students/accounts?
• I've tweaked the formatting of this page - hopefully it now looks a bit more like what you intended. Sorry - text formatting on wikipedia (bullets, lists, indents, etc.) can be a bit clunky and counterintuitive sometimes.

Have fun; bobrayner (talk) 16:22, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Hi - are you still around? Any more detail of schedule (and of students) would be helpful. (Please don't feel that I'm nagging you; if the course only starts a few weeks from now then there's no rush). If you need a hand with anything, just shout... bobrayner (talk) 01:29, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi,

It looks like quite a lot of students have set up accounts now, but I think there are two (Keosha Perris & Taya Eberle) who haven't set up accounts yet. Or if they have accounts, they haven't edited somewhere obvious so I don't know what their accountnames are. Could you check? Once the students page is complete, it will be very helpful. In the meantime I've sent a welcome message to everyone else and am watching their pages. bobrayner (talk) 14:01, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Hello

Hi Penny,

Mitkrow here. It says we are supposed to write on the other students pages but there are currently no links so I figured I would shoot you a message instead. I'm glad it seems we have some support from bobrayner. Looking forward to this tough but interesting project.Mitkrow (talk) 02:15, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Hi. I think there are other student pages you can add comments to now. Give it a try. Penny Powers (talk) 22:50, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Where to work

Hi,
There are lots of places where we could work on a new article(s), but I think the two best options are:

• Everybody works in separate sandbox;
• Everybody uses one sandbox (ie. yours).

The first one is best if everybody is working on different articles; the second is best if work is more collaborative, on one or two articles. What do you think? Feel free to use the course page for discussions &c too. There are already some existing articles which overlap a bit - it's fine to dive straight in and improve those (or maybe take a piece of a general article and use it as the nucleus of a new, more specialised article). bobrayner (talk) 23:08, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

I see what you mean with these two options. I think the best would be if people try uploading stuff to their own sandbox to see if they can fiddle with the formatting, links and references, and then when they think they have a draft, they can upload it to a sandbox related to this course page. Then we can talk about it and refine it until we're set to go "public". How do we get a sandbox for our course? Penny Powers (talk) 22:27, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

OK; that sounds good. I'll make a "centralised" sandbox for the course.

By the way, this is great - citation templates, headings, categories &c all in one go! (but It's OK to build things in smaller steps in a sandbox - a lot of editors do it that way). bobrayner (talk) 15:47, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Bob, I'm having some second thoughts on this and not sleeping at night. Our last class is on November 30 and students have to present what they've written. Writing this article is only part of what they have to do in the class. I'm not sure I structured this class very well. I haven't made short assignments in learning wikipedia along the way, and so students are not doing anything, thinking they can do it all at the end. The formatting is going to be a huge learning curve and students are going to panic at the end. The class is on Fridays and students are beginning to take the quiz on the chapters in the textbook, and then leave because I have no tests in the class, no final exam, so they don't want to be here to listen to the guest speakers I have lined up. What do you think of changing the assignment from writing an article to adding to an existing article? There is an article called "The Effects of Climate Change on Humans" and it's not very good and hasn't been updated since 2011. Could each student pair upload their work to that article? Would it all get deleted immediately? I've got to back off here or everyone's going to fail the class. Penny Powers (talk) 18:14, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry you are finding this so stressful, Penny. I think you should feel free to make whatever changes feel good to you as an instructor. For what it's worth, the basic outline of a structure that is on your Sandbox page looks pretty good. I think students could work away within a structure like that if you were OK with that.

As for working with the existing article, I would defer to Bob if he felt differently... but my guess is having students "upload" work into an existing article, or working within that structure may actually be more daunting to the students. My suggestion at this point is to have students author their sections in their own Sandboxes, and when I come visit on November 16th we can talk about the process of merging them into an article. I wrote Robin and Amanda again this afternoon and hopefully I will be able to speak with them before Friday. BrLamb (talk) 23:07, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

OK.

• I think we got off to a slow start; but that should be fixable, to an extent.
• I would strongly support a shift towards improving existing content, because writing a new article has a steep learning curve and it's rather "all or nothing". With an existing article, somebody else already got it over that hurdle so you can just concentrate on collaboration and content and sources (and the fiddly formatting stuff is already done)
• I understand that starting with your own clean sheet of paper may be less daunting to some people who are worried about trampling over somebody else's work, but trust me on this one - starting an article from scratch is deceptively hard if you haven't done it before, and it's more likely to be deleted. Expanding and improving and fixing other people's work is business as usual for wikipedia - if students are fixing an article's problems, it's very unlikely to be deleted.
• Effects of climate change on humans looks like a good place to work. Somebody has already put warning tags at the top of the article, which highlight the kind of work that is most needed. If you'd rather draft some improvements in sandboxes and experiment a bit, then take the changes into a live article, that's fine; but you can work directly on the article too.
• Please don't stress too much. Also, bear in mind that I'm a geek and I'm online very often, so feel free to encourage questions at the the course page (or on students own talkpages - I watch those too) in case they have any questions or bright new ideas during the rest of the week. You might only be in the classroom at a certain time on a certain day, but wikipedia is being edited 24/7.
• Also: Some of the editing so far has been quite cautious. If you or students make any mistakes on an existing page, it really is easily fixed. So, feel free to push a little harder and take risks & experiment with changes to a page. At worst, somebody will click "undo"! bobrayner (talk) 23:44, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the input, guys. I was afraid that doing a brand new article might be a problem as it would be so much new for the students to learn. I like the idea of uploading their work to an existing article. I'm going to go and delete what I did in my sandbox. Bob, don't bother creating a sandbox for our class. I think I should monitor the students' own sandboxes as they try uploading stuff they've written. Then when all three of us (me, Brian and Bob) think they can put it into the existing article, we'll go for it. I was very worried about changing an existing article, but you've allayed those fears for now. Plus, I went and did a grammatical change to that existing article this morning and the world did not end. Nothing bad happend and it wasn't deleted, either. OK, so my plan now is for our two campus ambassadors to take some time in class this Friday and coach the students up to speed. I've applied for a computer lab for one hour during the three hour class. I don't know if they can find me one, but if they do, then every student can be staring at a screen as Robin and Amanda go from station to station and make darn sure that every single one of them has a proper account, user page, talk page and sandbox. Then they will get every student to upload something, make a link, do a reference, and do some headings. All this before we go home. I will insist on it. You may be a geek, Bob, but I'm a control freak and I feel like this course is getting out of my control and I don't like it. This is my plan to get it back under control. Thanks. Penny Powers (talk) 00:02, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

-- Fantastic feedback Bob, thanks so much. We're lucky tp have you with us. And Penny, I only wish I could be there this Friday, but I think your plan is a good approach. BrLamb (talk) 03:41, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a good plan to get the situation back under control. What time will you be working on Friday, and what timezone are you in? I'll try to be online then, so you can get answers/inputs straight away instead of waiting til the next week... bobrayner (talk) 10:58, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

My class is Friday 12:30 pm to 3:30 pm Pacific time. I got an email this morning saying they have found a computer lab for me to use from 1:30 pm to 2:20 pm, so I'll go and email Amanda and Robin and tell them what I want them to do during that time. I couldn't make it longer because we have a guest speaker at 2:30 pm. The time we have will be totally packed and I'm not sure there will be time for me to get any answers from you, Bob, but I'll sit at one of the computers and have my talk page open just in case. It's only 50 minutes! I see this afternoon that some of the students still do not have a user page and/or talk page created even after I reminded them yesterday. I sure have a lot of things I will change for next year's class. I saw one student called this whole assignment a "gong show." I need to get them to help me fix this. Penny Powers (talk) 19:10, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

OK. I was supposed to spend tomorrow evening in the gym but this work is probably higher priority. :-) Also, bear in mind that wikipedia is a bit old-fashioned in this respect: You don't get alerted to updates in real-time like on Facebook; if you want to see any very recent changes you have to refresh/reopen the page - or if somebody adds a comment to your talkpage whilst you're browsing, the next page that you open will have that orange bar across the top to notify you. So, "real time" collaboration isn't very slick. bobrayner (talk) 10:02, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

thanks for putting the banner at the top of the existing article. And thanks for the advice to push the students a bit on editing. I will do that.

Secondly, how do the students get their name in parentheses after their account name on our course page? A few of them have it and the others don't. Instead of them signing a list to tell me what their account name is, I'd like to see their name on the course page. How do they do that? Penny Powers (talk) 19:44, 1 November 2012 (UTC)