Comments

"Negative" or critical comments are welcomed! I appreciate your interest.

That first line about earning 4 badges is a shortcut, a note for future development. So yes, we need to expand it, reword it, develop it into the framework that I've begun to do (but is still incomplete)... http://youthvoices.net/planning .... The idea is that a student could click on one of these badges and find quest specified for completition of that badge. The design of these badges is intended to imply that each set of quests is repeated three times -- once perhaps as a class inquiry, a second time independently, an a third time as a teacher or connected in some way to being a presence in the world outside of the classroom (more to explain here). 

As for asking students to analyze a wikipedia article, your argument against using it (i.e. "this is the one place students go to ALL the time to get information") is exactly why I would want to include a close reading and careful response to a wikipedia article at the beginnning of any research project. Check out what students are asked to do in the guide, "Response to a Wikipedia Article." They are asked to find two different sources to support two things they think are important in the article, then to find a source the questions something in the article. I've found this to be a wonderful way to start where the students are, and to help them realize that they need to use this source in a more critical way, Further, it's an easy next step to say, now that kind of analysis that you just did for that Wikipedia article, you should do the same with anything you find online or on paper, for that matter.

Having said all of that. I think we need to make clear that there are options in that first step. That the kind of source we are looking at is less peer-reviewed, less scholarly than we are looking for on the next box over. And that you don't have to do a Wikipedia article. It's just one option.

Thanks Jeremy!

Janet, great to hear from you. I love that Youth Voices might be included in the Writing for Change Academy. It fits well with the work we are doing in NYC too. As soon as you have a list of participants and email addresses, I can register students and set up a page like this one: http://youthvoices.net/wos/

And thanks for the thoughtful comments on badges and structure and flexibility. It's comments like yours that make me think we might be able to do badges in a positive way on Youth Voices.

It's all a grand experiment.

My tech partner comes back from vacation on the 4th, we are meeting on the 6th so I will get you the emails then. It looks like about 20 students at the moment. I love the idea of bringing the work to a larger audience. Looking forward to this partnership.

Thanks for the comment Tricia. That word, competition, makes me nervous for the students who fall behind -- always fall behind, and tend to give up easily. As Charlie Friej -- a NYCWP colleague in East Brooklyn High School has experienced with badges, the students who would have done their work anyhow get a lot of badges, and the less motivated students sometimes feel like it's not worth the effort when they feel so far behind. We need to think about keeping the worth of each badge high, yet find a way to give all students some "skin in the game," as Charlie put it.