Wikis
Now here’s a breath of fresh air: Richardson acknowledges the prevalence of Wikipedia in student’s lives and research. This chapter was actually very interesting to me, because truthfully, before I had Dr. Boyer’s technology class, I had no idea what a wiki was. I had no idea what Wikipedia meant other than it was like an encyclopedia that teachers insisted I couldn’t site or trust. Whatever, I still used it and just sited other sites. The whole concept of Wikipedia is really fantastic actually. I can’t believe that our perverse and distorted world can actually produce accurate facts and data when open to the public for editing without personal merit or credit. I was surprised to learn that Steve Jobs has been quoted saying that Wikipedia is one of the most accurate encyclopedias in the world. It’s amazing to me that the work of vandals and spammers doesn’t last long in the Wikipedia world as the pages are constantly edited. Dr. Boyer presented a screencast in class one day about a Wikipedia page on some German metal band, I believe, and the pages evolution over a span of time. It was vandalized multiple times, but fixed within minutes. This was some obscure band mind you, and the fact that someone was there to correct the page in such a short time period was mindboggling to me. It made me feel lazy to say the least, because I know if I saw a vandalized or inaccurate page, I would probably just scoff at the content, deem the site unreliable and move along. I wouldn’t fix it. Now I’ll think twice about my non-contributions.
Of course, the chapter gives real life examples of teachers that use Wikis in the classroom and various examples of ways to use the many available wiki services. The wiki concept is a great idea, but it scares me a little for classroom use. Wikis are fairly easy to create and navigate, but sometimes having a hundred online places to go is overwhelming. I never know where to look for what. Where did I save this? Where did I save that? Is it on my wiki or blog? Which wiki? Which blog? Ahh! I like the ideas of wikis; I’m just not sure how I want to incorporate them into my classroom yet. Integrating technology is important, but my Spanish or ESL class can’t become a technology class, I have to do some language content in there too.
The good news is that I feel better about letting my students use Wikipedia. As a future educator, I will share with my students the facts about the creation of Wikipedia and its upkeep. Perhaps they will b inspired to create their own wikis on their own time and/or contribute to the wiki world out there.
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