Ok. I'll be honest with the world today, I am going to make a confession. I am a grad student studying to be a teacher, I majored in history and I use Wikipedia. *Gasp* There! I said it, "I use wikipedia." Let's face it, we all do, even our professors with fancy letters after their names (doctoral degrees) Wikipedia is often the first (or second) site that pops up when we google just about anything. I will admit that when I come across an topic that I don't know or need to get the "gist" of, I use wikipedia. It is a great site for the basics, to give you a general idea of a topic. But it is not, however, a proper source when researching a paper and should not be cited by students.
A recent article in Education World called, To Use or Not to Use: Wikipedia in the Classroom, addresses some of the questions, educators face about how(or even if) teachers should treat wikipedia in the classroom. Tomaszewski, an associate editor at Education World, notes that increasingly teachers are using Wikipedia as a tool to teach online literacy and proper research techniques. As a future history teacher, the article immediately caught my eye. Research is one of those skills that is extremely important in history but also for life skills. Tomaszewski sets down a couple of ground rules including, "Don't cite wikipedia," a rule even suggested by Wikipedia editors for educational use; "Don't use Wikipedia Simply Because its First;" and "Know your Source" What Tomaszewski means is, you need to go the extra mile and actually read the endnotes on the wikipage and track down those sources. It is those sources and the sources, your source uses that are more apt to be reliable - though you should carefully examine each source and judge its reliability. Tomaszewski concludes the article with an idea for a classroom activity to build information literacy skills online through examining wikipedia articles.
As a future social studies teacher, I think I (and other teachers too) need to recognize the fact that my students are going to read the wikipedia article even if I say not to. Because of this, I might as well teach them how to examine the site carefully and take everything they read with a grain of salt. If I transform Wikipedia from strictly speaking of the open-source website as evil and not to be used, to a site that can be looked at for basic, broad reading with reservations, my students will appreciate and learn a skill that is much more valuable in this technology, information-heavy age. Online literacy is a skill that educators need to teach to students, including a proper use of Wikipedia sites.
Tomaszewski, J. (2012). To use or not to use: wikipedia in the classroom. Education World. www. educationworld.com.
Caitlin,
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad that you found an article about using Wikipedia. I remember my high school teachers always telling us to never use Wikipedia, and then when I got to college most of my professors said that it's okay to use it to get the basics but that you need to do more research beyond it. I think that it would be very smart to teach our students how to use Wikipedia properly as a starting point for any research that they do because, like you said, they'll most likely use it even if we tell them not to. If we want to teach our students how to think critically then what better way to do that than through analyzing the benefits/pitfalls of using Wikipedia?