I want to consider the effect of wikipedia on education. Many kids consider wikipedia to be a (or the) definitive source of information for projects. It is interesting that at the Web 2.0 conference they spoke of how wikipedia is now the number one “educational” web site, having surpassed the other on-line encyclopedia sites. Can wikipedia be considered a proper source for information to be used in school? I have heard that many teachers will not allow wikipedia to be used as a source? What other sources are allowed to be cited in a report?
What if something emerged that was even more locally driven than wikipedia? Let’s say that the chess club stated a wiki on chess. Over time, the members of the chess club would have assembled quite a bit of information on chess in the wiki. A classmate new to the game might be directed to the wiki to learn about the game, it’s history, etc. Would this be wrong? If the wiki were contained to the school only, there is a chance that the information in the wiki would be skewed by the fact that only students in the school contributed. If the wiki were on chess.com for example, does it make it a better source; a more credible source? Does the number of page views or contributions make it a better source?
Another aspect is the questions raised by teachers who say that a given site is not “credible” or “allowed”. It is clear that teachers get to set the rules for assignments because they create the rubrics for scoring the assignment. But, are they the definitive source of what is “credible”? The tragedy at Virginia Tech and the “Katrina blog effect” shows that the Internet is in many ways a better source of news about a situation than traditional news sources. Would teachers take a blog post as being credible? I suspect that most teachers would not. However, many of the traditional news sources now attribute information to bloggers. Does this make the traditional news source no longer credible to the same teacher?
From a personal perspective, I think the idea of a definitive source I can trust is something that I would love to hang onto. But, having grown up in an era of “Question authority”, I am no longer sure that what I desire is possible, let alone reasonable. However, bloggers do get rated by the “net”. So, perhaps one could create a metric for teachers by which they could tell their students, “If the blogger is rated higher than X, then I will accept a blog post as a source”. I will have to do some research on this.
