The above (taken from the absolutely awesome web comic xkcd — visit or you’re a fool) pretty well sums up my feelings toward wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. It’s both an amazing resource and a fabulous time waster, and has become my quick go-to source for quick information about any subject, from actors and actresses to vacation destinations.

Yes, there’s the very real possibility of information being incorrect or (much more commonly) badly written, but the mountains of information more than make up for it.

Education has struggled with wikipedia since it hit the scene. Almost immediately after hearing wikipedia described to them, educators decided it was a menace — the academic equivalent of speculative hearsay. The rules fell into place very quickly: never cite wikipedia in a formal essay. You might as well source the National Enquirer.

Hearing their teachers continuously hammer home the message that wikpedia is unreliable has apparently had an effect on students, as evidenced by this report from a Generation Y workshop.

Interesting discussion during Dave Brown’s Generation Y workshop at LIFT08. It seems asking a few teenagers how they use the Internet is always going to produce a few findings like these:

Wikipedia is not seen as a very good/valuable source in school when it comes to usage in school work.

(emphasis mine)

And, sure, wikipedia probably shouldn’t become an automatically accepted authoritative source for academic essays. But you know what? Neither should anything else. The underlying message to all this “wikipedia is so unreliable!” chest-besting (which isn’t even really true) is that sources should be judged based on the medium in which they appear, and not on the quality of the source itself. For the most part, kids aren’t being told to look at their sources carefully before they quote them in an academic paper — they’re being told that the internet is bad, and print is good.

There is a way to make wikipedia a part of education, and it starts with teaching students the difference between a well-researched article on wikipedia versus a poorly-researched one. It could include instruction on examining footnotes, looking at the history and discussion pages and the way the article is presented. In short, teaching kids how to research instead of just blindly hunting for sources that their teacher has deemed as ‘acceptable’.

Wikipedia does have a place in academia. To argue otherwise is to ignore the massive growth and mindshare the site as claimed over the last few years. And there’s a way to make wikipedia fit with good, qualified research — it just requires a different approach to teaching.

I love e-mail. It’s undoubtedly my primary means of communication at work, to the point where I feel as if I could give up my phone tomorrow and not really be impacted. Honestly, I think being able to communicate effectively via e-mail is an absolute must in pretty much ANY industry these days, including unlikely ones like carpentry and stock car racing.

And while I love to rail on business for being backwards technologically, I’d be really hard-pressed to argue that e-mail wasn’t adopted quickly enough. Because it exploded onto the scene and became incredibly pervasive very quickly.

That said, there’s a whole lot about e-mail — and, more accurately, the way people use e-mail — that drives me crazy. Having spent many of my years in the office in a mostly unofficial ‘tech support’ role (something I’m sure a lot of Gen Y workers can relate to), I’ve seen absolutely mind-bending practices from co-workers when it comes to their e-mail programs.

I think a lot of the odd behaviour stems from the fact that e-mail did come into offices so quickly. If you think about it, nobody was ever really trained on e-mail, at least not like they were trained on how to use the copier (or whatever). Habits that may have made sense for composing, sending or filing ‘real’ mail were transferred over to the electronic Inbox, despite the fact that those habits make almost no sense when dealing with electronic media.

In that light, I don’t blame anyone for adopting these bizzare practices. But I’m still going to make fun of them.

What follows is five non-sensical things people do with e-mail.

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