Principedia

Principedia, the community-sourced wiki about learning at Princeton.

First-year students, use Principedia to select your courses and get a head start on the semester. You can help reveal Princeton’s invisible curriculum by adding your piece to this first-of-its-kind resource.

Principedia is an interactive, wiki “encyclopedia” which gathers, organizes and circulates local knowledge about effective learning in the Princeton context. You’ll find articles about specific courses – many of them large lecture courses -- that include a detailed description of the course design and instruction, an analysis of its learning demands, and a set of strategies for effectively engaging course content and instruction. The primary purpose of Principedia is to impart context-specific methods of learning--including approaches, strategies and techniques--rather than subject matter content as other wiki-encyclopedias do. Principedia rests on what can be termed an “ecological” perspective on knowledge creation on our campuses, from which it is understood that expertise in the processes, skills and strategies of academic learning is distributed throughout our community among multiple constituencies and a multitude of individuals. Though much of this knowledge is tacit, relatively unorganized and seldom exchanged in a concerted manner, this expertise can be made explicit and accessible by engaging community members in systematic reflection and analysis of the campus learning culture and experience.

Principedia provides a unique forum within which to realize a fundamental aim of the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning: to engage faculty, staff, graduate students and especially undergraduates in systematic reflection and substantive discourse about the practices and processes of learning in Princeton’s distinctive academic environment.