Chapter 4
Will Richardson makes an excellent point in saying that wikis can serve as a valuable learning tool for students. Personally, I never knew what “wiki” meant or what constituted a “wiki” until I read about it in his book. That is the first way in which Richardson helped me this time around. I am, as are most people, I think very familiar with Wikipedia and have used it for a variety of purposes: whether I’m just looking up some random fact that I’m curious about or looking for a starting point for a research paper, and I’ve never found the site to be inaccurate. Therefore, I think students should be encouraged to use the site, along with other wiki sites, in the same manner. Richardson points out that people frequently mistrust wikis because they can be edited by anyone, but I want to ask, how is it better to trust a site that can only be edited by a select few? In any case, a group of people are deciding what is true and what is not. A group of people is limiting or expanding upon the information. I think the fact the whole world acts as your editor on wikis can make the information not only more expansive but also more accurate as well.
I really like the idea of using a wiki in the classroom. I think it would be a fun way for students to collaborate and, together, become specialists in a certain area. You can have them working together, editing each other, checking each others facts in a much more accessable way. We already have students doing this in a classroom, why not have them do this via the Internet? Wikis go where blogs cannot go. Both are about sharing information and collaboration, but wikis would allow students to collaborate in a much more intimate way. Blogs can be used to put personal opinion out there, but wikis can be used to actively engage in a communal sharing of information where the students would be able to go to one place to collaborate and expand the communal knowledge.
jpeel1
I like that you mention a criticism of expert-privileged information systems that is not often voiced: that perhaps we are apt to trust these sources because they are “authorities.” In a democratic society, we may have an obligation as citizens to actively question all forms of information and the assumptions that come with them…certainly wikis make the importance of such critical mindsets more obvious.
dc