Wikipedia and education: making it fit
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.
This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Education, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Ikkuna September 30th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
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