Human Rights Encyclopedia: Blog

Below, I have embedded a YouTube video of an application for Android-enabled mobile phones that will supposedly allow disaster relief workers to make custom maps of disaster areas.  It is not clear who the creator of this application is, nor if it is even a real application.  Nonetheless, it is an interesting idea.  It also gives me some quick, human rights-relevant content to try out YouTube embedding capabilities of this blog.

Alison Brysk, Professor of Political Science at UC Irvine used a wiki in her Human Rights course last semester.  Today she tell's us about the experience.

"I decided to incorporate a Wiki writing project in my upper-division undergraduate International Human Rights course.  As the course has grown from 40 to 60 to 80-plus students, I don't feel I can assign a traditional research paper, especially in a 10-week quarter.  I believe in and have read about the importance of collaborative learning, but I've also often been frustrated with assigning group projects:  group members' input is uneven, too much time is spent on administration, and the output often doesn't cohere.

The Wiki project solved several of these problems, and sparked the students' interest in a way I haven't seen in years.  First of all, students were highly motivated by knowing their work would be posted  in cyber-space, which seems to impress them far more than my evaluation or even the social reinforcement of a class presentation (which I had tried in previous years). They could collaborate more loosely by  assigning sections or functions to each member, and some who were not necessarily eager writers were very good with links and images.  The Portal wasn't really able to offer a web composition space that met their needs, but one of my better students told us about a free, public, non-commercial space we could simply sign up for, and my TA monitored their usage patterns.

I think it is especially important to integrate a project like this with the class material.  So I assigned them Wiki topics keyed to the lecture and reading modules, and coordinated those with their oral
presentation assignments.  While students had less freedom, this insured that they did not choose topics that were too big, too narrow, or poorly conceptualized--and I kept stressing their responsibility to provide knowledge that would be of benefit to future students and the interested public.  I had grouped the oral assignments around lecture units; for example, the day I lectured on the theme of Discrimination, one student would do a presentation about immigrants in Japan and another on the Jena case in the
U.S.  This meant that when they sat down to write a group Wiki on discrimination, each student had some degree of ownership of some relevant case or example, and I think for some this was an essential
building block.

The next time I do this, I would probably provide more reading lists or bibliographies to get them started.  The best students found this on their own, but the less able were light on sources and/or cut and pasted too much from other web sites.  I might also do more mid-stream check-in; much of the work was done at the last minute, but some came together better than others, and some good students
still suffered at the hands of weak links despite my exhortations and attempts to referee or work around the slackers.  Finally, while most of the entries were solidly researched, one was replete with errors
and unverified speculation, and I realized belatedly I had no way to screen that *before* the misinformation was circulated--the classic Internet unreliability problem.

The good news is that the combination of collaboration and multi-media learning reached a large number of students in an important but difficult subject area.  Ideally, I would like to see it combined with more traditional writing exercises and individual projects.  But it is a worthwhile alternative, given the pedagogical limits and challenges of a large public university."

You can find the wiki for her class here