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Students in a senior English class examined the question of whether the "wisdom of experts" or "the wisdom of crowds" is more reliable and useful in a writing course by engaging in a parallel Wikipedia project. Each student either created a new entry or made significant changes to an existing Wikipedia entry, tracked changes to their contributions, and then wrote a paper and gave a presentation reflecting on what they learned; simultaneously, the class as a whole collaborated on a Wikipedia entry about a local landmark's controversy. Background readings familiarizing students with Wikipedia's procedures, as well as critical and philosophical interpretations of Wikipedia's significance, provided students perspective on Wikipedia's utility. While the instructor expected students to enter with an uncritical understanding of Wikipedia's reliability and then to see Wikipedia's fundamental untrustworthiness, students' work demonstrated that they entered the class skeptical about Wikipedia and that their projects showed them that Wikipedia was mostly reliable and useful. In this experiment, students showed that they were at an intermediate stage of "personal epistemology" and still had not achieved the level of reflective judgment sought by the school's information-literacy competency goals.

Two sections of university-level technical writing courses were given an authentic task to write an article for publication for an outside stakeholder. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to determine the differences in learning outcomes between students using traditional writing methods and those using social media to generate articles. One section was randomly assigned to follow the traditional writing process using computer-mediated writing and small group peer workshops of paper drafts, while the other section published its work-in-progress on a course blog and engaged in web-mediated online collaboration to determine if there are meaningful differences between computer-mediated and web-mediated writing as measured by learning outcomes in terms of publication rates and grades. The results of this study demonstrate that utilizing an online social network in the form of a course blog positively impacted learning outcomes; however, a close examination of the published peer review feedback on the course blog indicated a moderately negative relationship between the quality of the feedback received and acceptance scores. Thus, the value of the web-mediated workshop was not based on the outcome of the workshop, but rather on having providing feedback, which generated a higher level of engagement and more time spent on task as compared to the paper draft workshop section. (Contains 3 tables.)

With the ceaseless development of new and more advanced technologies, along with their growing influence and control over business and commerce, it is no surprise that the educational community is struggling to come up with programs to educate students to adequately handle these developments. Textbooks are becoming a thing of the past, for information and standards are changing faster than any publisher is willing to re-publish. Instead, a student of advancing business technologies must be able to adapt and learn from the 'here and now' while efficiently filtering out any antiquated information. These students must also be able to handle the myriad technologies currently in use and solve complex problems. This paper investigates innovations in experiential learning and their application to enterprise systems integration education.

EdCamp is a grassroots movement of do-it-yourself professional development "un-conferences" that originated in Philadelphia in November 2010. In just a little over a year and a half the phenomenon has gained serious momentum across the country and now around the globe. This teacher-driven, bottom-up approach to professional development has reinvigorated educators' passions for learning by creating an environment that, according to participants, rewards their curiosity, allows them to explore their passions, and values their knowledge and experience in the classroom. In this interview, four EdCamp participants--Kristen Swanson, Dan Callahan, Bill Selak, and Karen Blumberg--talk about how social media and web 2.0 tools have fanned the flames of this movement and why teachers are so eager for a professional development experience that they themselves create.

Academic institutions mediate online literacy practices in meaningful and significant ways. This essay explores the nature of that mediational process, using a visual-spatial method to map out and conceptualize dynamics and structures that have a bearing on the work of composition. A key argument is that composition teachers are intellectually positioned to influence institutional approaches to academic computing. (Contains 3 figures and 2 notes.)

This article presents a report regarding the editorial process and publication statistics of the American Economic Review (AER) in 2003 and 2004. The editorial process of AER is a cooperative enterprise. Papers are received online and are processed at the Pittsburgh office in Pennsylvania, and are then distributed online by the editor to one of the co-editors or to himself for refereeing and for a publication decision. The 2003 increase was partially a result of the introduction of online submission. The number of publications declined in 2004, a result of the working off of the backlog accumulated by an above-average acceptance rate in 2001 and 2002.