one teacher’s journey

A recent article in the Crimson echoes similar stories from Cornell and Tufts, all in relation to the Middlebury ban.  The slant in the beginning of this one focuses on the shift by some profs to actually include Wikipedia articles as part of their syllabus. 

Here, again, the balance seems to exist.  Some professors assign their students to author and edit Wikipedia entries–a good way to create the “editors” that Will Richardson always advocates for. 

One professor, who assigned articles for reading, admitted that-due to the ‘unstable’ nature of the entries–”perhaps I should re-look at the entries from time to time.”
Isn’t this what we should do with all our teaching resources?  Just because a photocopied article (shhh!) has worked well for years, is it still relevant?  The best I can find to illustrate a point?  This, to me, is just good, reflective practice…regardless of the inclusion of Wikipedia in my course materials.

Harvard Hebrew Literature and Philosophy Professor Shaye J.D. Cohen, in commenting on the need to be skeptical about Wikipedia, said:

“Wikipedia represents all that is great and all that is dangerous about
the Internet.  It is incredibly powerful and readily
available, and yet can mislead the unwary and spread disinformation.
One hopes that a good undergraduate education will enable students to
assess what they are reading.”

One hopes that, if we are doing our 21st century jobs correctly, a good secondary education will enable them to do so as well.

It seems as though Middlebury College isn’t the only one. I wonder if this is a sign of things to come, with more professors making it clear that they will not accept Wikipedia as a cited source.

It certainly appears to be a growing trend of bloggers and “journalists” opening with misleading headlines. The Cornell Daily Sun’s Ben Eisen writes of professors who will not allow Wikipedia to be cited. Yet even the profs agree that Wikipedia has its realm of usefulness.

Cornell history professor Aaron Sachs:
“I tell my students that Wikipedia is sometimes a decent option for a
getting a basic overview,” he said. “But even then it takes a lot of
practice to recognize when an entry might be more or less reliable.”

Eisen does quote students in his story, however, which gives a more well-rounded perspective:

“I will use Wikipedia if I need to look up an equation or if I want to
get background information before starting my research, but I wouldn’t
ever cite it in a paper,” said Michael Lazar.

The understanding of Wikipedia’s limitations seems to come from many arenas. “(E)ven Jimmy Wales, the site’s co-founder, says that neither Wikipedia —
nor any other encyclopedia — should be used as an academic source.” (from Eisen)

What about high schools? Those teachers who require research of any kinds have already encountered Wikipedia in the Works Cited page. Is it worth “taking a stand” and making a clear ban on citing it? I’m starting to think so, under one huge condition: that we, as educators, do a better job of explicitly teaching our students how to evaluate sources for reliability and validity.

I hear the voices now…”I’ve been doing that for years!” Yes, so have I. But web sources like Wikipedia are a brave new world that few of us teachers have sought to understand. If we are going to teach students how to be evaluators (or “editors” as Will Richardson calls them), then we must first understand how these new tools work and how they are different from the sources of even a year or two ago.

I’ve been quite interested in the latest flap over Wikipedia and the recent ban by the history faculty of Middlebury College in Vermont. At issue is the citing of the community-edited online encyclopedia in academic work.

This is a polarizing issue among educators, as are most technological innovations. Time is often the best judge of the worthiness or merit of any new technology, but what to do until that final judgement. Do I, as an English teacher, allow Wikipedia to be cited? Do we, as a high school staff, take a particular stance on the issue as well?

I appreciated a recent article in the Tufts Daily, “So long, truthiness: Middlebury bans Wikipedia in the classroom,” and the comments from a number of Tufts history professors. What I appreciated most is what appears to be a rather balanced and thoughtful view of the web tool.

“It’s a popular knowledge compilation that, as a scholar, would be
dangerous to rely on,” Malchow {history professor at Tufts} said. “However, as a first step – as you’re beginning some research or for basic knowledge that you’re not going to assume is necessarily accurate – it can be incredibly
convenient. I use it myself sometimes as a starting point.”

“I don’t deny that it’s a useful tool,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s a scholarly tool.”

I also agree with Associate Professor Gary Leupp as well:

“I think [a ban on Wikipedia] is irrational,” Leupp said. “It’s
important to inculcate a critical sense in students about any kind of
source.”According to Leupp, no source is truly credible. To him, choosing which information to believe is what learning is all about.

“Students have a tendency to read a book by one fallible human being, and then to say, ‘Well in the book they said …’ They – as if it were a
committee,” Leupp said. “Students often revere sources in a way, but
they are written by individuals.”

“Students should disagree with and doubt parts of anything they read,” he continued. “It’s all part of the critical reasoning faculties you want to develop in a history class.”

And an English class…and math…and science…and life. To me, it seems we are missing the point. Here is a real-world opportunity to teach our students how to question validity and reliability, and we are–in many cases–running from it by deciding to ban it outright. And we all know how well bans work, right?

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, critical_thinking

Okay, so this blog stalled a long time ago. I spent much time trying to figure out how it should look and exactly what I should be writing about. Unfortunately, I didn’t blog as I was doing that…which is the whole point of a blog!

So, here I am again, hesitant to “start”, because I’m too caught up with finding the perfect way to begin, or the most profound thing to say. I recently attended a very personally and professionally rewarding Web 2.0 conference in Philadelphia with Will Richardson, hosted by Chris Lehmann and the Science Leadership Academy. It was actually a recent post on Chris’s blog that gave me a little kick in the pants to quit stalling and blog.

At the conference, I discovered–either from Will, or from contributions of the other amazing teachers and bloggers in attendance, or from insightful conversations on the way to lunch or during down times–some incredible tools that are at our disposal as learners and teachers. I have a long list of “things to try” that I am just beginning to work my way through.

The part that has me even more overwhelmed is the questions that were raised in those conversations. This was not some group of tech geeks who were intoxicated by the new web tools, these were serious teachers with profound pedagogical questions about how to use these tools (or even if we should use them) to improve our own learning and to enhance student learning. These are the questions that baffle me at the moment.

No easy answers. No specific timeline or deadline within which I have to have all the answers. Just a whole lot of possibility and discovery ahead.

The piece of advice that seems to resonate the most with me from the conference is Will’s encouragement to “start small”. So, with that, I’ll close for now.

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For their initial post, I asked students to blog about their first blogging experience (for most of them) when they responded to my prompts about Of Mice and Men. Most of their posts were basic and marked by the typical errors I would expect. Many of them saw no benefit in blogging, and some commented that they didn’t think it would change the way they write (or right, or wright…).

Perhaps when they start getting comments back, or discover that readers beyond the classroom or building are reading their stuff, they may take an additional second or two to proof and edit their posts.

But how do you fight the pervasive attitude that web language is it’s own, and spelling and grammar (and even capitalization) are only an issue in the paper world?

Or do you?

My summer school students have entered the blogosphere. I finally set aside my apprehension and posted an “assignment” on my classroom blog, asking them to respond to a couple of traditional questions about Of Mice and Men. It is nothing too technological; just using new technology to do something old. But, it’s a start.

That is one thing that resonated with me while reading Richardson’s book: a suggestion to “start small” (I think I read it there…). I suppose that is what I’m doing, and I should give myself some credit for that.

I have so many questions still; many of them related to the technical aspects of blogging: how do trackbacks work? how do I use technorati tags? how do I do a better job of linking students to one another (blogroll? bloglines? RSS feeds?)?

I set up Sage in my Firefox browser, loaded a few feeds into it, and I like the possibilities I see so far.

Setting up each of the students on Learnerblogs.org was a little clunky. Most of it had nothing to do with the website itself; thank you to those who are offering the space and maintaining it! We educators love free stuff! But we had issues here with email addresses, computer issues, etc. Eventually, though, they all ended up with a blog of their own.

One thing I need to do in the future is decide on some policy issues, i.e. responsible use. And how do you balance the need to protect kids and make parents happy, and allow for true conversation and expression to take place. I need to do some more reading before the school year starts in September.

I also need to explore the possibilities of housing our student blogs on our own server. Our tech guy found some pretty clear instructions for using WordPress (which I am so far impressed with) on our own server. Now we just need more server space….

Ah, so much more to say.

I am ashamed to admit this, but this blog was created about a week and a half ago. Yes, this is my first post.

I don’t understand my reluctance to begin blogging. I love dabbling in technology, new things, cool geeky stuff. So why the dragging of the techno-feet? Perhaps it the perfectionist in me. I want to get it all exactly right the first time. I don’t want it to be messy and disorganized and awkward.

In truth, I can’t remember the last time I was so excited, chomping at the bit, to incorporate something new in my teaching. It started at the end of the school year when I picked up a copy of Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. It’s a dangerous book–practical tools and tips mixed with a boatload of tough-to-refute arguments for using this relatively new medium in the classroom. Next thing I know, I’m creating a blog, then a wiki (there’s nothing on it yet, of course!), then I’m talking to the tech guy at school and swapping ideas and concerns. Then I’m determined to use my summer school English class as a group of guinea pigs to test out the awesome power of blogs in the classroom.

Yet, I write this late at night at the end of the first week of summer school, having yet to even mention blogging to my students, let alone getting them up-and-running.

Again, why the reluctance? Fear of failure? Perhaps. That is certainly the roadblock in non-technology areas of my life. But this just isn’t me. I usually embrace new technology when some other colleagues panic.

I have to come to grips with the fact that the art (or whatever it is) of blogging will require me to push the edges of my comfort zone. It’s a process where I can not wait until it’s all nice and neat and boxed-up before I bring it in to the classroom. It may be messy, and that’s part of the charm. I realize that it’s ongoing, continual, a process.

Which is why I can more easily force myself to stop this post in mid-thought, without a clean and perfect ending, and go to bed.