I (heart) Wikipedia
Kevin Lim recently posted a presentation he created on using the Wikipedia in academia.
Thanks to Slideshare, you can see his visual aid (the link above will actually show you a video of the talk).
It’s a great idea to invite college students (undergrad or higher) into a high school to tell high school students how they conduct research for their classes. I always felt I had to sort of “teach myself” the ropes of research when I was in college. We knew how to use the card catalog and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, but were wholly unprepared to deal with academic writing, an electronic card catalog, and journals.
What I found missing from Kevin’s slides, and it’s likely missing in a lot of other places too, is the detail surrounding what he mentions around his discussion of “berry picking.” The Web is an excellent research tool because you can link to all these other sources of information. But it’s also a poor one: there’s so much stuff (good and bad), you may not be able to easily distinguish expertise from good marketing, and how to you manage all the webpages you do find?
I can imagine the kid hearing this (honors or not), and thinking… “Gee… this is kind of like… you know, wearing your seat belt. It’s good to do it, because it can save your life. But… I mean, last week, I got away with it. I drive safe enough. I didn’t get killed. I didn’t get caught.”
More research? Yeah, research isn’t typing “G O O G L E” or “W I K I P E D I A” and printing the first thing you find. I’d advise any teacher to break up research projects by stopping kids at every step and doing mini-evaluative assessments. Maybe, even, kids can draw a meta-map of their research process (there are many tools to do this, my favorite, Omni Graffle, another popular in schools, Inspiration).
I’ve been working with our technology resource teacher on a “Research for the 21st Century” initiative. It’s a work in progress, but it gives students actual concrete tools for reporting what they find (verbatim), how they have backed it up (found confirming sources), what they know about the source(s), and how what they found expands their initial research idea (thesis). I figure if we do well enough, it could be a nice guide or better, a book. We cover advanced techniques with Google. We cover non-traditional media. We cover domain lookups. We also suggest methods of digital collection and bookmarking (using folksonomization tools) and here’s another idea–getting feedback from peers.
Kids need help with research more than ever. It’s too tempting to believe the first thing you read. (Many adults need reminded of this, too.)
I think too many educators “feel” and consequently block Wikipedia when there’s nothing to fear. Like Lim says, quoting his former professor, Alex Halavais, the search ought to begin with using a encyclopedia (read: Wikipedia), but never end that way. It’s funny, but I’ve heard that same advice in our own libraries and media centers for years, referring to the World Book and Encylopædia Britannica.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
John, thanks so much for attending virtually.
The issue of “knowing what’s good from bad” on the web is a particularly difficult one. I’m not sure if the Q&A was capture well enough as I attempted to answer this.
Much like how Google’s PageRank mechanism works, one of my suggestions was for the student to see how often his chosen reference has been cited before. Granted it’s not an entirely simple thing to do, but it ’s a benchmark.
How would you go about recommending a workflow?
Good luck on your “Research for the 21st Century” initiative!