Wikipedia & Learning

I feel pretty conflicted about Wikipedia. I use it almost daily to quickly look up information, for use in school (basic facts about everyone and everything, from Antigone to zebras) and at home (TV episode guides, definitions, and much more). I've edited articles (and am apparently one of few women who have done so). So I feel terrible that I have to tell students over and over again that they can't use it in academic writing--particularly because I know the editing community is pretty good at catching errors! Just check out the revision history of a controversial article and search for vandalism; errors are sometimes found and reverted instantly by the site's and eagle-eyed editors. Here's the past 500 edits of the article about Barack Obama, for an example.

When the site blacked out in early 2012 in protest of SOPA/PIPA, I definitely noticed. I felt inconvenienced. But I worried more about what would happen if those bills passed. The idea that "Information wants to be free" is, to me, at the very heart of what we do as educators: we democratize learning by sharing what we know with our students, at no cost to them. I love that the internet provides access to information at little/no cost to people around the world.

Yet we have to train our students how to curate information for themselves. We will not always be there to provide resources for them. So, I'd really like to use this course to focus on how to effectively impart what the Partnership for 21st Century Skills calls Information, Media and Technology Skills. It is incumbent on me, as an educator, to teach students how to evaluate source credibility, author or organization bias, and usefulness of information. I learned these skills through experimentation and, as an undergraduate journalism major, through formal training from my own teachers. I don't want this to be left to chance for anyone else. I am committed to showing my students how to exploit their enviable access to information, gather and sift through their findings, determine what is useful, and manipulate it to maximum effect. My goal: for students to know exactly when they should look for things on Wikipedia, and exactly when they shouldn't. For students to know how to perform advanced Google searches that allow them to exclude commercial results. For students to understand that websites they visit may be biased--and identify which ones are. For students to be able and willing to go beyond Google and Wikipedia when they have to. And for students to become passionate about finding, taking in, and transforming information in order to express their own new and innovative ideas.