Yes! This is a great way to harness a digital resource rather than dismissing it. More or less, everyone uses Wikipedia because if for nothing else, it's usually the first hit in a Google search. I agree with the article in that most students aren't allowed to cite Wikipedia but they do use it as a jumping-off point for their research. So in this sense, it IS valuable. One of the reasons I like it in a pinch is the colloquial tone in the delivery of the information. I usually feel like a buddy is explaining it to me rather than a Phd. If students could capture that tone but provide quality assurance on the facts, there's a real research gem to be had here.
In Goldman's view, the very popularity of the site stands in tension with its goal of radical openness. The freely editable nature of Wikipedia has made it a canvas upon which vandals, spammers, and pranksters can paint at will.--Goldman
Clay Shirky (Here Comes Everybody) argues the oppositte: that enough people care about wikipedia to prevent it from devolving into chaos, which is what would happen if nobody cared.
Quite an interesting move by University of California, SF - med students will now be able to receive academic credit for editing Wikipedia articles about diseases.
Because entries are anonymous and collaborative, no author is tempted to showboat and, in the pursuit of literary glory, swerve from the aim of clarity and utility.
At the strenuously collectivist Wikipedia, it seems, “ownership” of an article — what in legacy media is called “authorship” — is strictly forbidden. But it’s more than that: even doing jerky things that Wikipedia calls “ownership behavior” — subtle ways of acting proprietary about entries — is prohibited.
Timely article about ideas of ownership and authorship and collaboration on wikipedia. Mentions that you can type "WP: OWN" into Wikipedia to read its policy about "ownership" of articles. "The page is fascinating for anyone who has ever been part of a collaborative effort to create anything."
Articles on media literacy -
an excerpt from their newsletter:
Here's how George Mason history professor Mills Kelly teaches media literacy. "'We will work together as a group to create an online historical hoax that we will then turn loose on the internet to see if we can actually fool anyone.'" His students have created stories that have fooled Wikipedia (but not Reddit) and provoked the ire of Jimmy Wales himself. We're delightedly amused at this intriguing piece from Brendan Fitzgerald, which examines the tradition of published hoaxes within the larger discussion over media transparency and credibility. While we agree that planting deliberate lies makes our job a little tougher, there's definitely value in its effort to challenge the largely assumed reliability of Wikipedia and other crowdsourcing efforts. It begs the question: are today's kids digital natives or "digital naives?"
Access to Wikipedia free for all 70 million Orange mobile customers in Africa & Middle East, incurs no mobile data usage, no data plan even required. Access to information seen as a "public good"
Understanding the information source use of contributors helps us to understand how new Wikipedia articles emerge, how edits are motivated, where the information actually comes from and more generally, what kind of information may be expected to be found in Wikipedia.
By providing results before a query is complete and removing the need to hit the "enter" key, Google claims users will save two to five seconds per search
Search engines do the work for us. We don't even need to know how to find the information ourselves these days.
What's more, this feature enables truly personalized discovery by taking into account your search history, location and other factors -- Google is essentially emulating social networks by trying to predict what we're looking for without the need to submit a fully-formed search
The next step of search is doing this automatically. When I walk down the street, I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly: 'Did you know ... ?' 'Did you know ... ?' 'Did you know ... ?' 'Did you know ... ?
In thinking about evolving technology in terms of both formal and informal education, I question whether or not constant and immediate access to information is improving or harming individual knowledge. By this I mean that because we can so easily search for something online, what motivation is there to actually know anything. If we have Wikipedia on our phones, and know HOW to find it, can't we just spend 30 seconds finding the page and "know" something for topic of conversation, or a test? What is the point, then, or learning, of retaining knowledge? I feel that this may be a problem in coming generations. What knowledge will our students actually feel they need to retain?
I took solace in the fact that at least we have to learn and teach HOW to find the information, but with new technologies like predictive and instant searching, it almost seems like that is a skill that will soon become unneeded as well. We might as well just be physically plugged in to the Internet with access to all information simultaneously.
Thoughts from the group?
A new proposal calls for a Consumer Reports-like rating body to evaluate new digital learning tools. Ed tech innovators like the idea in theory but they worry that it won't work in practice.
Talks about different groups that are trying to help classify and rate the various ed tech products out there--more and more are released every day!! So how do teachers know what is useful and what is not? Discusses initiatives and some possible con's--so many are released and so many are updated that it may be impossible to keep up the evaluation pace.
Funny, I was just talking with someone about this very idea the other day. We absolutely need something like this and my guess is that we will have a few competitors, at least early on, for the top ed tech review site. I think there is space for both an organization that specializes and for a yelp like site that essentially crowd sources the reviews. It will be tough to keep up, but think of how many products and areas Consumer Reports deals with- we can do this, and need to do this, for ed tech to get used wisely in our schools.
With regards to e-learning, I think inevitably some company or organization will provide ratings of the quality of online degree programs and learning tools. Whether this is Consumer Reports or US World & News Report or some new player (investment opportunity?), the need for objective assessments of digital learning tools is definitely needed.
The Benchmarking e-learning wiki is interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchmarking_e-learning
Online textbooks containing multimedia that are easy to update. Appears to be a combination of an E-textbook and wikipedia. (Link contains example Flexbook.)