What Are the Benefits?

Research shows benefits for students learning in the open. We know that students who learn in public tend to learn differently. It can help students develop a voice, open the classroom beyond the institution’s walls, and for some students it can be more motivational to take courses seriously when they feel a responsibility to someone beyond the course instructor.

Blogging can be great way for students to build community beyond the classroom and position themselves as junior scholars within their disciplines.

Assignments with public accountability force students to approach their work with a sense of responsibility in how they are representing their information. We know, for example, that when students are accountable for their citations on Wikipedia — and have to answer to an existing community — they attend to those details more carefully.

(There’s also a public good to having students edit Wikipedia. In addition to improving a shared resource, you can help correct the gender imbalance in the Wikipedia editing community.)

And developing playable games as a way to demonstrate knowledge helps to mobilize that knowledge — a task increasingly important for upper-level undergraduates (and their instructors!) to be thinking about.