Eduzendium

Eduzendium is Citizendium's educational outreach and partnership initiative. Citizendium authors and editors who work with university programs or professors/instructors create research and writing projects for their students. We've simplified much of the article creation process so that students can concentrate on creating content. Your students become full citizens at CZ and are free to edit any editable article on CZ and are not limited to your Eduzendium project. To date, The Citizendium has hosted eighteen university courses from 11 different universities world-wide.

If you have registered with Citizendium, you can start a page for your Eduzendium course here.

About Eduzendium[edit]

University faculty can use the Eduzendium project as a platform for their students to write original articles as a course assignment. Eduzendium has been designed to be extremely flexible and adaptable. For the duration of an instructor's Eduzendium course, other CZ authors are asked to respect your students' articles as off limits for general editing. This can create for your students a safe atmosphere where they can learn the mediawiki engine, the mechanics of article creation, and the joy of wiki-editing, without the added stress of defending edits before the community (as would be the case at other wiki sites). Additionally, the CZ community is very friendly and helpful and always available (when we are here) to answer questions or offer advice when citizens post on our talk pages.

Citizendium's Eduzendium Project does not have any grade-space; and given the confidentiality of the instructor-student assessment relationship, instructors are urged to keep all assessment data, including any assessment-related comments, private by not posting such comments on Citizendium. Remember, The Citizendium is a public space.

Getting Started[edit]

Instructors[edit]

When you are ready to set up an Eduzendium course project, you can set up some of the pages automagically here (Instructors must also have an account at CZ).

Once your course is created, instructors should:

1. place a description of the set task on an Eduzendium course page (created during the course creation process) and complete the Eduzendium templates and pre-load pages;
2. Specify an "end date" on the Eduzendium course page. After that date, the article(s) reserved for the course will be opened for general editing.
3. You can reserve articles on which students may work by listing their titles on the Eduzendium course page. Using the {{r_EZ| }} template will allow your students to start the article by the simple pushing of a button. You should try to find new article topics for students to work on (ones that have not yet been created on CZ), or existing articles with an article status of 4 or 3 (import or stub). Existing articles with a status of 2, 1, or Approved are too developed and CZ would prefer not to remove them from general editing. Your students are free to edit any editable article on CZ and are not limited (by any CZ policy) to your Eduzendium project.
4. The instructor should start those articles and place an Eduzendium template on the article's main page, closing the article for editing by anyone except those involved in the course. Instructions for how to do this are found on your course page once you create your Eduzendium Course.

The course instructor may set whatever specific guidance for the students is appropriate for that particular course. (For example, they may set a word limit, or require inclusion of figures, or specify a particular article structure, or number of references.) The task may either be formative (an exercise in developing skills in team work, literature research and presentation) or summative (for formal assessment). The page history will provide a record of every student's individual contribution. The talk page may be used for discussion amongst students and for feedback from the instructors.

Students[edit]

In order for students to participate in CZ's Eduzendium project, they must register as Citizendium authors. Registration requires that students abide by the Citizendium charter and community practices as authors;

1. article content should not be offensive or derogatory, nor violate copyright law, including especially the use of any images;

Some Citizendium articles that started as Eduzendium projects[edit]

The following articles on the theme of appetite and obesity were originally written by University of Edinburgh undergraduate students working in groups of about 4 students:

•  Circadian rhythms and appetite: Daily variations in the regulation of food intake. ^[e]
•  Energy balance in pregnancy and lactation: Adaptations in the control of food intake and energy expenditure in different reproductive states. ^[e]
•  Evolution of appetite regulating systems: Comparisons of the mechanisms regulating food intake and energy expenditure between species. ^[e]
•  Glucostatic theory of appetite control: The theory that changes in blood glucose concentrations or arteriovenous glucose differences are detected by glucoreceptors that affect energy intake. ^[e]
•  Melanocortins and appetite: The regulation of food intake through neuropeptides related to adrenocorticotropic hormone. ^[e]
•  Stress and appetite: The interactions between the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis and the regulation of food intake. ^[e]
•  Food reward: The brain mechanisms involved in reinforcing feeding behaviour. ^[e]
•  Gut-brain signalling: The interaction between the gastrointestinal tract and the brain. ^[e]
•  Diabesity: A term referring to the intricate relationship between type 2 diabetes and obesity. ^[e]
•  Genetics of obesity: The evidence for a genetic component to obesity in humans. ^[e]
•  Bariatric surgery: The surgical removal of body fat. ^[e]
•  Drug treatments for obesity: Treatments of obesity that are based on drugs. ^[e]
•  Exercise and body weight: Correlation between physical activity and the body mass index. ^[e]
•  Health consequences of obesity: Long-term effects of obesity on health. ^[e]

Other examples:

•  Music perception: The study of the neural mechanisms involved in people perceiving rhythms, melodies, harmonies and other musical features. ^[e]
•  Speech Recognition: The ability to recognize and understand human speech, especially when done by computers. ^[e]
•  Mashup: A data visualization created by combining data with multiple computer applications. ^[e]

See also[edit]

• A list of courses already integrated in Citizendium
• Eduzendium Testimonials — Eduzendium instructors discuss their experiences here.
• Eduzendium press release - January 24, 2008

|width=10% align=center style="background:#F5F5F5"|  |}