Crowdsourcing Latin American Politics timelines

As someone who used to publish course materials for Latin American Politics courses, I loved the article by Wilson (2018) where the class was assigned a long-term project over the semester to crowdsource timelines for Latin American countries.  One of the key course goals in that course was teaching about political development in general, and how it occurs specifically in different countries in that region.  This project reflected that key course goal in a really unique way.  I've done similar activities in this program where the class was asked to annotate a shared document, for instance, building out a complete conceptual map of a topic.  I didn't love the way we had to do that project, but as with the project in this article, it was a really interesting way to get people engaged with their learning.  What the project in this article it was how the researcher showed that the project itself led to far greater learning opportunities and outcomes for the students.  I know that when you ask a learner to produce information and/or teach it to someone else, learning skyrockets.  I just thought this was a really cool assignment that was set up easily for the students (and I'm impressed the professor used LaTeX to do the layout on the timelines).   Putting my editor hat on, it was also something that if I were still in my role as editor, I'd have wanted to partner with that instructor and build out the project, and the output for use in the Latin American Politics texts I published back then. Clever and creative use of crowdsourcing!!     


Wilson, M. C. (2018). Crowdsourcing and Self-Instruction: Turning the Production of Teaching Materials Into a Learning Objective. Journal of Political Science Education, 14(3), 400–408. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/10.1080/15512169.2017.1415813

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