YES!
Is Wikipedia a friend of foe to teachers? I say yes! You might be thinking that this questions requires one answer, you have to choose, but do you? Why is it a binary concept that as a teacher you have to feel one way or the other about Wikipedia? It has many uses, some are good, and useful to teachers, to students, and to our technology driven society in general. However, I think many people agree that Wikipedia has its issues, especially for education.
How can Wikipedia be a friend to teachers? I think by this point at some point in our lives we have used Wikipedia, especially since many times it is the first link that comes up on searches. Wikipedia is a good starting point, to make sure that the topic that you are going to research is really what you think it is. It can be a good place to start, read through the article and see what you would want to know more about. Also, since most, if not all, Wikipedia pages have sources listed, you can use their sources as a springboard for your own research. Also, you can use Wikipedia to show students that it is not a reliable source. One idea that was brought up in discussion was to print off a Wikipedia article and a reliable source article on the same subject. Take out all the information that says where each source is from, and give it to your students and have them figure out which is more reliable and why. After the activity explain to the students why Wikipedia is not a reliable source, however, it is a place to go to begin searching for ideas to research. By explicitly teaching the students how to use Wikipedia, and explaining how and why it is not the end all and be all of information, we as teachers are able to educate our students both in and beyond our subject areas.
How can Wikipedia be foe? For all the reasons many educators (including my self) have been steering students away from it for all these years. Because it is essentially a living document of every growing ever changing information, sometimes the information can be false, or simply too broad for educational purposes. Even though there is an oversight process for Wikipedia, the extremely vast amount of information is not reviewed as often as it should be to be considered reliable. There is information that has yet to be added to Wikipedia, as well as information that is simply out of date.
So yes, Wikipedia is both friend AND foe for teachers. The most important thing that we as teachers should be doing with Wikipedia is education our students about it, telling them how it can be used, and how not to use it.
I agree with a lot of what you have said. I too was in between on the matter. There are ways that Wikipedia can be used in a positive way but if you want your students to be researching from a reliable source, why would you let them use it? It is hard to really pick a side with this matter. My question to you is, will you let your students use this site in the upcoming year?
ReplyDeleteLauren,
ReplyDeleteIt would depend on the age of the students, and what I am asking them to research. I currently do not have a job for the upcoming school year so I do not know. For older students, grades 6-12 in a general music class if they were doing some sort of project in a musician, I would let them use it as a starting point, however they must have other sources to back up their Wikipedia findings. In elementary general music I would not have them use Wikipedia, my time with them would be so limited that I would not want to take the extra time to teach them the possible downfalls of Wikipedia. In a performance ensemble they would not be doing a lot of research at all, so it would not really matter.