Our Thinking
by Sergio Yanes
There’s no doubt that technology has increased the pace of our world. With the automation of menial tasks --- such as remembering a phone number --- we find ourselves trying to accomplish more things, master more subjects, consume more information. Social media evolves daily to find more effective ways of communication, as if 160 characters is really all we need to say everything we have to say. Our to-do lists grow longer, and soon, our lives are reduced to a series of checkboxes we are desperately racing to finish. In this light-speed world, we often have to remind ourselves that there is a world to experience. That we need to slow down and see, instead of just look. We find ourselves in a world that is only an inch deep. Our students find themselves in a more chaotic predicament: They are natives in a world that changes vastly every 5 minutes. From a teacher’s perspective, this can be a logistical nightmare! I’ve heard fellow teachers complaining about everything from students’ shortened attention spans to their lack of motivation in completing even the simplest of tasks (Perhaps that simplicity is the problem…). But, aren’t these all criticisms that have been flying out of teachers’ mouths since the dawn of public education? It’s about time we take a look at ourselves and our practices. We need to stop blaming our students for not living in the world we grew up in. First, we need to come to terms with the fact that the world is changing. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, the US has been speeding towards some unknown goal. So, what can we do? Students process information; it’s an adaptation to a faster world. They need to understand themselves in order to understand the world. It’s up to us, the teachers, to slow them down and help them understand what they do. I’m not talking about procedural tasks or specific information they need to know. I’m talking about taking that information or skill and putting it to use. I’m talking about destroying their inner automatons and making act and live deliberately (Thank you, Thoreau). Slow down. Take a look around. Question why the world is the way it is. Second, we need to forget everything we know about traditional teaching. Vygotsky wasn’t kidding when he said that learning is democratic. Dewey wasn’t lying when he wrote that students need to experience life from within the schoolhouse. The classroom isn’t a reservoir of information anymore. Then again, was it ever? In this world where every byte of information is available at the swipe of a thumb, we need to teach students to screen through information. Play with it. Shake it up. In other words, the classroom needs to be the sandbox of information. Students need to manipulate and reshape—sometimes, just to see what could happen, but often to be able to make sense of their reality. We have learned to adapt, and so should our students. We do that by mirroring and replicating the tasks they will be asked to complete when they leave the sandbox. Instead of telling students that “this skill will help them out in the ‘real world,’” we need to accept that this already is the real world. So, instead of preparing students to live in the race toward some unknown future, we need to prepare them to live now.
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by Katie Rybakova
Teachers often scoff when they hear the term Wikipedia. It’s a term that is connected with many opinions, some of which are as hard hitting as bias, falsity, and even plagiarism, while others a softer idea of laziness, a “cope out” from “actual” research. When I present on Wikipedia, I ask, after the usual grumbles about Wikipedia, if the audience members use Wikipedia themselves. A resounding yes—they won’t use it in the classroom, they won’t teach it, they go so far as to nix it from any research-driven classroom activity, and yet, often use it as one of the first sources for their own research. These are researchers, professors, secondary school teachers; I remember how my own teachers would swear against us using Wikipedia as a source (of course, we did anyway), but to continue to have this opinion in the 21st century? I wanted to look into this problem. I spent countless hours Googling Wikipedia, but often was left surprised at how little attention current educational research was giving this very well known website. I decided then to conduct a review of research on Wikipedia—I would collect what I could find on the site, then analyze the general consensus—are we for, in the 21st century classroom, or against, Wikipedia? A little background—Wikipedia, a combination of “Wiki,” or a source on the Internet that can be edited by anyone on it, and encyclopedia, an area for an immense coverage of different concepts and things, went live in 2001. Within the first year of being a live site, Wikipedia went from 1,000 articles to 20,000 at the end of 2001, and by the second year, hosted 100,000 articles just in its English version (Rosenweig, 2006). The growth of the site sparked the growth of students in the classroom using it as a source for research. In 2006, the Alexa traffic rankings placed Wikipedia at number eighteen out of all sources on the web, above New York Times Online, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the Library of Congress (Rosenweig). It continues to be the lead hit on most Google searches on various concepts. It is clear how this connects to the classroom—should we, as teachers, or should we not, allow students to use it as a source? Could it be used for other activities? In addition to the practical usage of Wikipedia, there is also an underlying political one—digital texts and digitalization of information in general has been the topic of mandates continuously since No Child Left Behind (Department of Education, 2013). The Race to the Top Initiative continues to emphasize the uses of technology inside the classroom and the professional development of teachers to do so in its statues as well (Department of Education, 2013). Essentially, though, or, if you will, on a societal level, it is clear that the shape and functioning of texts differs from the traditional sense of composition, and the distribution of writing no longer rests in the hands of a press (Wysocki, 2009). The most important variable, especially for educators in the classroom today, is the growing need for fine-tuning information literacy and research skills, helping students become critical consumers (Kniffel, 2008). What, then, is the issue? Of course, because any registered user of Wikipedia can edit the site, many educators see Wikipedia as an unreliable source of information that students use. Scholarship shows the continuing argument amongst academia regarding Wikipedia as a research tool (Eijkman, 2010). What I did was find 55 articles on Wikipedia. I used JSTOR, ERIC, and Google Scholar using the keyword Wikipedia. All of the articles that are included in this review of research (34) were published at the earliest in 2005, and at the latest in 2012. This gap in research from 2001 to 2005 can be explained, perhaps, by the growth of Wikipedia as an online research source. Essentially, the majority of articles that accepted Wikipedia as a source in the classroom were from the field of humanities and social science, namely education related articles (33% of education articles accepted Wikipedia into the classroom). 33% of the articles that wrote a scathing prohibition of Wikipedia were education articles, while the resounding majority were articles from the hard sciences. In general, 24 out of the 34 articles were in favor of using Wikipedia in the classroom. Statistics aside, what was most interesting to me was the reasoning behind the choices of acceptance versus prohibition. The negative reactions to Wikipedia stemmed from the obvious—Wikipedia is unreliable because it is being updated by Joe Shmo, Wikipedia has caused negative experiences with students plagiarizing or submitting poor work, and a general “easy way out” for students, a general consensus across all of the articles that prohibited Wikipedia from the classroom. It was interesting, though to see what the articles that suggested teachers utilize Wikipedia in the classroom suggested. Generally speaking, there was an overall positive experience with using Wikipedia. Because of its popularity, most teachers and authors acknowledged that students would, whether prohibited or not, use Wikipedia as a source when researching. Some articles even justified the accuracy and completeness of Wikipedia sources. Most suggested Wikipedia be allowed as a starting point for research; a use of explaining critical consumerism to students in this digital age. Research skills and information literacy skills were used to identify specific concepts that could be taught using Wikipedia in the classroom. The research I did boils down to this—if we do want to use, as teachers, Wikipedia in our classrooms, or teach pre-service teachers to use Wikipedia in their classrooms, we need to expose them to it just like we would want to expose our students to it. Yes, it’s not the only source that students should go to for information. But, it shouldn’t be something that is prohibited outright, because, if you know anything about 6th to 12th grade kids, a rule isn’t going to stop them from using it. It’s better to expose students to Wikipedia—it’s positives AND negatives—rather than keeping kids out of the loop when it comes to an important skill—critical consumerism and information literacy skills. Aycock, J., & Aycock, A. (2008). Why I love/hate Wikipedia: Reflections upon subjugated knowledges. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 8(2); 91-101. Bennington, A., & Baur, J. (2008). Dissecting the web through Wikipedia. American Libraries, 39(7); 46-49. Biddle, L., Donovan, J., Hawton, K., Kapur, N. (2008). Suicide and the Internet. British Medical Journal, 336(7648); 800-802. Bohannon, J. (2011). Google books, Wikipedia, and the future of culturnomics. Science, 331; 1. Bravo, V., & Young, M. (2011). The impact of a collaborative Wikipedia assignment on teaching, learning, and student perceptions in a teacher education program. Canadian Journal of Learning & Technology, 37(3); 2-25. Brown, A. (2011). Wikipedia as a data source for political scientists: Accuracy and completeness of coverage. PS, 339-343. Doi: 10.1017/S1049096511000199. Brown, J. (2009). Essjay’s ethos: Rethinking textual origins and intellectual property. CCC, 61(1); 238- 258. Calkins, S., & Kelley, M. (2009). Who writes the past? Student perceptions of Wikipedia knowledge and credibility in a World History classroom. Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, 20(3); 123-143. Campbell, C. (2009). Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia (review). The Drama Review, 53(4); 185-187. Chandler, C., & Gregory, A. (2010). Sleeping with the enemy: Wikipedia in the college classroom. The History Teacher, 43(2); 247-257. Coiro, J. (2011). Talking about reading as thinking: Modeling the hidden complexities of online reading comprehension. Theory into Practice, 50(2); 107-115. Coiro, J. and Dobler, E. (2007). Exploring the online reading comprehension strategies used by sixth-grade skilled readers to search for and locate information on the Internet. Reading Research Quarterly, 42; 214–257. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.42.2.2 Crovitz, D., & Smoot, W.S. (2009). Wikipedia: Friend, not foe. English Journal, 98(3); 91-97. Davidson, C. (2009). Young children’s engagement with digital texts and literatices in the home: Pressing matters for the teaching of English in the early years of schooling. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 8(3); 36-54. Denning, P., Horning, J., Parnas, D., Weinstein, L. (2005). Wikipedia risks. Communications of the ACM, 48(12); 152. Department of Education. (2013). Improve student performance. Retrieved 16 Nov 2013 from http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/pg34.html. Elder, D., Westbrook, R., & Reilly, M. (2012). Wikipedia lover, not a hater: Harnessing Wikipedia to increase the discoverability of library resources. Journal of Web Librarianship, 6(1); 32-44 Eijkman, H. (2010). Emerald article: Academics and Wikipedia: Reframing web 2.0+ as a disruptor of traditional academic power-knowledge arrangements. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 27(3); 173-185. ERIC. (2012). About the ERIC program. Retrieved 1 Nov 2012 from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/resources/html/about/about_eric.html. Fontichiaro, K., & Harvey, C. (2010). How elementary is Wikipedia? School Library Monthly, 27(2); 22-23. Forte, A., Bruckman, A. (2006). From Wikipedia to the classroom: Exploring online publication and learning. ICLS; 182-188 Google. (2012). About Google Scholar. Retrieved 1 Nov 2012 from http://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html. Hardy, M. (2007). Wiki goes to war. Australian Quarterly, 79(4); 17-22. Harouni, H. (2009). High School research and critical literacy: Social Studies with and despite Wikipedia. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3); 473-493. Jancarik, A., & Jancarikova, K. (2010). Wiki tools in the preparation and support of e-Learning courses. Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 8(2); 123-132. JSTOR. (2012). Using JSTOR. Retrieved 1 Nov 2012 from http://about.jstor.org/content/using-jstor-0#JSTOR-Content. Kittur, A., Chi, E., Pendleton, B., Suh, & B., Mytkowicz, T. (2007). Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie. WWW; 1- 9. Kniffel, L. (2008). Authority and Wikipedia. American Libraries, 39(7); 4. Konieczny, P. (2009). Governance, organization, and democracy on the Internet: The iron law and the evolution of Wikipedia. Sociological forum, 24(1); 169-192. LaFrance, J., & Calhoun, D. (2012). Student perceptions of Wikipedia as a learning tool for educational leaders. National Council of Professors of Educational Administration, 1-15. Maehre, J. (2009). What it means to ban Wikipedia: An exploration of the pedagogical principles at stake. College Teaching, 57(4); 229-236. Oblinger, D. (2007). Becoming net savvy. Educause Quarterly, 3: 11-13. Pollard, E. (2008). Raising the stakes: Writing about Witchcraft on Wikipedia. The History Teacher, 42(1); 9-24. Porter, A., McMaken, J., Hwang, J., Yang, R. (2011). Common core standards: The new US intended curriculum. Educational Researcher, 40(3); 103-116. Purdy, J. (2009). When the tenets of composition go public: A study of writing in Wikipedia. CCC, 61(2); 351-372. Rozenweig, R. (2006). Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past. Organization of American Historians, 93(1);117-146. Schweitzer, N.J. (2008). Wikipedia and Psychology: Coverage of concepts and its use by undergraduate students. Teaching of Psychology, 35(2); 81-85. Shareski, D., & Winkler, C. (2005). Are Wikis worth the time? International Society of Technology in Education, 1. Viegas, F., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., & Ham, F. (2007). Talk before you type: Coordination in Wikipedia. IEEE; 1-10. Wysocki, A. (2009). Seeing the screen: Research into visual and digital writing practices. In C. Bazerman (Ed), Handbook of research and writing: History, society, school , individual, text (599-611). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis group. |
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