Comments on: Don’t Judge a Wiki by its Cover

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:36:45 +0000

I love it! Thanks Martin.

By: Martin Levins

Martin Levins — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 08:56:36 +0000

“But my kids don’t use it well, they just plagiarise it without thinking critically” is probably more of an indictment of the question they were asked than their procedure in respondng. If the question/assignment topic is along the lines of “describe the causes of the second world war” then their plagiarism is justified: lots of people have written about this; how can a student write anything new?

What if the question were “How would a school newspaper article for a school in Munich in 1939 describing the political tensions between Chamberlain and Hitler differ from a similar article in a British school?”

Many moons ago, I showed the internet to a group of History teachers, one of whom said “I can;t use this to teach History”

When I asked “Why?” she responded “I don’t know if anything is true or not”

To which I replied “isn’t that what the study of History is?”

By: Sue Chrisfield

Sue Chrisfield — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 02:55:48 +0000

I agree with your comments here. I am a school librarian and see my role not as censor of material, but rather to provide students with the skills to make critical evaluations of the resources they are using, be they print or online. We have Wikipedia linked through our catalogue with our other online encyclopedias. It is great to be able to show the kids how wikipedia is constructed and the ways in which it differs to a traditional encyclopedia [some reasons you have listed above]. As you also mention, bias and inaccuracy does not just appear in web sites and wikipedia. I must defend the teacher librarian here. I used to run a small unit which was embedded into science and English where students could compare information found in different resources [print and online] and then discuss different ways in which this conflicting information could be written up. This naturally led on to the importance of referencing and evaluating one’s sources. However, the classroom teachers have decided it is a waste of time and it is no longer taught. I spend a lot of time begging teachers to allow me to teach these skills, but most of the teachers do not see the relevance.