It's kind of ironic that I had to comment on this chapter when last week I saw a piece on one of the National nightly News about Wikipedia and the affects it has on colleges. In the piece, they mostly went over the negative aspects of the site. They focused on a History class and one professor. The main thing that they were negative about was using the site for research purposes. In history classes, you have to muttle through alot of research, and since wikiepdia is a major site, then it's not far fetched to believe that students use the site. The main thing is if the resources found on the site is accurate. The reporter went into the site itself and showed just how easy it was to change things. She actually added some useless information in place of some information that was accurate. The point was to show the negative aspect of the site.
But what they failed to show, at least I didn't see it because I was at work watching it, was that a few hours later, the stuff she added was probably erased. The book tells that there are plenty of editors out there that combs the wikiepedia website looking for garbage information. It goes on to say that within a few hours, most garbage entries are erased and the truthful things are put back in.
As a future teacher, I would like to use this tool in my classroom. But I realize that I will have to do a lot of research to make sure that the information the students may come across is accurate. Obviously, bad stuff is going to be put on it. But if you make your students aware of these negative things, then they might keep that in mind as they navigate through the website.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
The comment you made about editors who trash comments on Wikipedia that are not accurate was a good point. Any time I use wikipedia, I always double check the facts and so far they have been accurate. As usual, the media is often one sided when telling a story.--Sharonda
It's interesting, I was reading in the paper about two weeks ago that one of the creators of wikipedia is creating a new site of similar function, I believe it is called citizedium, but it will be moderated by scholars in the fields of interest.
Post a Comment