Wikistudents. Teaching consumption through production hands on with Wikipedia

Abstract

This paper describes and reflects on a teaching experience developed as a complimentary workshops to MA class on history, theory and politics of consumption. We used Wikipedia as a tool to consider the circuit of knowledge production in the Web 2.0 era, where consumers are no longer passive audiences but producers and consumers at the same time. We developed a collaborative team-work workshop aimed at the production of Wikipedia entries on topics related to the class content. In this note we describe the structure of such “Wikiworshops”, our teaching strategy on sources management, teamwork and group teaching, and elaborate on students' reception of the workshop. Wikiworkhops proved to be an effective exercise in a collaborative economy of knowledge, and an opportunity for young sociologists to be part of it, expressing their creativity as well as becoming aware of the boundaries and limits inherent in the mechanism.