This article advocates a lesson plan for introductory comparative politics and elections courses. The authors argue that Wikipedia (yes, Wikipedia) provides a unique platform for improving learning outcomes and a useful social good from traditional student papers on elections. The proposed lesson plan can achieve this in at least three ways: (1) by providing social incentives for learning and a method for students to contribute to social science knowledge from their earliest courses, the incorporation of Wikipedia editing can improve student learning and retention; (2) incorporating an online information component can help both future students and researchers by improving the quality and quantity of easily accessible and well-referenced information about historical and upcoming elections; and (3) the use of the Wiki format is becoming increasingly common in both business and government. Teaching the basics of editing is an increasingly useful skill for students to learn for future employment.
Communication networks are the patterns of contact that are produced through the exchange of messages among actors across space and time. Social networks, more generally, describe the patterns of relations among these actors. Communication researchers were among the pioneers of the study of communication and social networks. In recent years, the study of social networks has grown dramatically, attracting an interdisciplinary community of researchers from biology, communication, computer science, mathematics, physics, political science, psychology, sociology, and statistics. While the major focus on network scholarship has been on
describing
networks, recently there have been substantial theoretical and methodological advances in
explaining
the emergence of networks. The future of scholarship on communication networks is exciting as researchers make rapid theoretical and methodological strides in understanding and enabling networks.
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