Hi,
In my opinion Wikipedia and YouTube are not bad resources for students to use. When explaining an assignment that called for studens to use either of these tools I would stress the importance of checking their facts and possibly having another source available to obtain additional information about a particular topic. For me personally I will use Wikipedia as one of my resources when planning a lesson and possibly during instruction.
In the past I have had several teachers who were totally against their students using Wikipedia as a resource because they believed the information was invalid. After listening to the podcast and thinking back on the gender of my teachers who were against the use of Wikipedia as a resource, I realize now that a majority of them were women. It's sad to think that these teachers choose not to take a small risk and have their students learn/use Wikipedia as a source for information for an assignment. In the end I believe if my past teachers would have invested a little more time to learn about Wikipedia they would have learned that it's not as bad as it seems. Furthermore, when discussing the assignments my teachers could have stressed the importance of using a secondary source in addition to Wikipedia if they were uncertain of its validity.
Hi Kesha,
ReplyDeleteI’m one of those teachers who doesn’t let my students cite Wikipedia, though I’m not against them looking at it for unofficial, basic information. I don’t think that Wikipedia is wildly inaccurate, but I do believe there’s some poor information available on Wikipedia that I wouldn’t want students to rely on. Students searching for information are unlikely to be able to discern reliable information from falsehoods My bigger concern about Wikipedia is that a lot of the information on science, which I teach, is either over simplified or too complicated to be helpful to a high school student. Either case can lead to students being confused or misled. For science, I don’t feel Wikipedia is a good tool for secondary students. I also want my students to learn how to find strong references online, and Wikipedia is too much of a crutch, preventing students from learning to source information on their own. I realize these concerns may be entirely invalid for an elementary teacher, such as yourself, or even a teacher in a different content area.
Does telling students that Wikipedia is a poor resource and then asking students to create a wiki send a bad message? I don’t believe so. Most of my students enjoy a competitive challenge, so creating a wiki with the goal of being more accurate than a hugely popular site might actually be good motivation. Additionally, I think students can easily be helped to see that Wikipedia’s possible inaccuracies stem not from the wiki format, but from the massive numbers of editors who do not collaborate and have total anonymity, so creating a wiki where collaboration is key and all editors’ contributions are specified is clearly superior and worthwhile.
Both Fu and Deters showed that wiki projects allow for good collaboration, which is a strong argument for their use. Interestingly, Deters cited Cann et al. as finding that students often see wikis as “frivolous activities” rather than substantial learning opportunities. Perhaps this is related to the fact that Wikipedia is so roundly bashed in academic circles, or perhaps because it is used so commonly for non-academic pursuits. However, Deters found that after creating wikis, most students found them to have a lot of instructional promise. Fu also found that students held quite positive views of the way wikis enable collaboration and communication. So I think students will come around to the idea of wikis if they use them.
I found it not at all surprising that students in Fu’s study found their lack of familiarity with wikis to be a drawback, and of course they found the reliance on consistent internet to be a challenge. This was despite students being guided by general subject teachers, trained by IT teachers and aided by a teacher librarian. However, they also found that students embraced the challenge of learning a new format. This suggests to me that it’s very important for teachers to choose a site for student wikis that is easily learned and that has limitations that will not affect the type of work they want students to do, as Deters mentions became an issue in her study, and to give students strong support in learning how to use the site. This should enable students to view the constraints as positives, as Fu’s students did.
Hi Dayna,
ReplyDeleteYou have a good point about Wikipedia and secondary science classes. I don't think it would be a good idea for students to use wikipedia for a secondary science class unless they had to look up a famous scientist quickly. And then to I wouldn't use wikipedia as my only source. It's also important for students to learn how to research valid information online and not stop at the first response that comes up in a search. Yes, as an elementary teacher I may not have some of these concerns, but since we are moving towards a strong technological presence in the classroom I think it would only be best to inform/teach my elementary students, especially 3rd - 5th grades, how to research information on the web and why some sites are better than others..
Is there a way to judge the quality of the Wikipedia entry? I might suggest (as I did previously) in looking at the footnotes. You can also view the revision history of any Wikipedia page.
ReplyDeleteAs for wikis themselves, I think with the growth of Google Docs/Apps, wikis are fading somewhat from the spotlight. They were the first mainstream asynchronous collaboration tool, and it's good for collaborators not in proximity to one another to work. However, students are often collaborating synchronously with students in their own classroom, so they may fail to see the usefulness of the tool.