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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.

The Yale English professor and former intelligence agent Norman Holmes Pearson both epitomized and helped develop the deployment of the scholarly field of American Studies as a weapon in the Cold War. He leveraged his extensive connections in U.S. academia, professional societies, foundations, and the Department of State to help forge the state-private networks that drove U.S. cultural diplomacy in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly as their focus turned from Europe to the Pacific region. He was particularly influential in Australia, where he helped direct money and influential scholars to the new American Studies programs at Australian universities and to ANZASA. In this, he embodied how the short-lived Pax Americana was built by bureaucrats and functionaries, until it collapsed in the wake of the Vietnam War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports a study that examines the efforts of one school--Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania--to improve student writing in first-year learning communities by promoting so-called process-based writing pedagogy outside of writing classes. Administrators encouraged instructors of subject-matter classes to integrate the writing pedagogy used in the first-year writing classes, thus improving both the writing and the teaching of writing across the community. Several surveys assessed how Duquesne's learning community program integrated the "process-based" writing pedagogy utilized in the first-year writing classes across all of the courses in each community--and how students and instructors evaluated the resultant improvement in student writing. Results suggest that these efforts were largely unsuccessful. Reasons included faculty overwork, too little attention to writing pedagogy, communication difficulties, and status differences between writing teachers and other faculty members.

Bulgaria ruffled Yugoslavia's feathers for including Macedonia as part of its historic territory, and Greece's and Turkey's for laying claim to Thrace. Such nations, she persuasively demonstrates, were not just puppets of their affiliate superpowers; they established and carried out cultural (and, she implies, economic and even military) policy separate from and sometimes even in conflict with the dominant nation. But for a girl growing up in Bulgaria in the 1970s, the only anniversary of real importance was "1300 Years Bulgaria", the expansive commemoration of the 681 CE founding of the medieval Bulgarian state. [Extracted from the article]