Wiki-phobia

My apologies for not posting during our off week last week, as I said I would.  I fully intended to, but have been enmired in what could only be described as a Crisis of Educational Faith and it has tended to completely throw off my scholarly stride.  More on that later, if it ever seems appropriate for me to delve into it in this public forum.  Some who read this may know what I'm referring to. 

Anyway!  I'm writing here again, and this time, I will do my best to not wind up careening off on some semi-fictional tangent this week, and make it read like a real blog entry.  Promise.  Well, I'll at least try...

David Warlick!  A wonderful and lively talk is given here:  We saw a brief clip of him a couple weeks ago, but I tended to focus on discussing the Alan November video.  I love listening to Warlick speak, and not just because of his buttery smooth accent, which drawls through his 'ya'lls' like honey on tobacco leaves.  I'm thinking he must be from one of the Carolinas.  Anyway!  I love his ideas about flattening education, and removing it from the old, tired model of "teacher on high."  It seems clear to me that the old style classroom doesn't work anymore, if it ever did at all.  His take on Wikipedia stands out, and as you may have gathered from my last post, I feel strongly about it. 

I know and have interacted with teachers who ban Wikipedia and similar online resources outright, and I just can't get over what a crying shame this seems to be.  I for one have spent hours poring over Wikipedia, finding myself spinning into what I think of as 'Wiki-whirls': reading intently on some interesting subject, finding a reference within the article you are reading to something else you are curious about, clicking the link, reading another article in which you find another link, clicking that, and so on and so forth.  You start out looking up the entry on Marvel Comic's 'Amazing Spider Man' to see who the villain was that Spidey defeated in Issue #347, only to click through to one of the contributing writers, which leads you to click on an article on Nuclear Fission, which makes you wonder what happened at Chernobyl, because you heard about it on All Things Considered the other day, which reminds you that you're curious what Scott Simon actually looks like, and you wonder where he's from, because his accent is hard to place, but you think he's from the Midwest somewhere, so you look him up, and it turns out his parents were in Vaudeville of all things, so then you start reading about old Vaudeville in Pittsburgh, and it turns out that one of the theatres you used to work in used to be a Burlesque House.  Wow!*  Now wait, what was I looking for in the first place??

It reminds me of the problem with the way drinking laws work in this country.  By banning something outright, you make it powerful.  You lend it mystery, you give it a forbidden air, you tempt and bait young, curious people to seek it out, if only to find out what the big deal is.  Like in the Christian Mythology: "Hey, Eve, Adam!  Check out this Apple!  Looks, pretty good right?  All shiny, delicious, hanging there, right within reach, lookin' all juicy and tempting?  DON'T EAT IT!  Seriously, don't even look at it.  Just pretend it's not there."

No wonder Eve caved!  God was totally messing with her!  We do the same thing with people under 21 in this country.  We say 'NO!  You shall not drink!' and then we stand right in front of them and do it ourselves, or we show them funny, flashy advertisements lauding how cool and hip and sexy people are while drinking shitty beer, and then we wonder why kids steal off and binge drink at their first opportunity.  We have created our own forbidden fruit, and paraded it around in front of young adults who are by nature curious, experience-hungry beings, and we have the gall to act surprised when they finally go off to college and turn into binge-drinking idiots.  But I suppose that is a rant of a different flavor.  Back to the subject at hand.

We perform a similar disservice by banning things like Wikipedia outright.  If we tell students in a classroom that anything that is 'Wiki' by nature is untrustworthy, and must therefore be shunned, we are LYING to them.  And lying is the death-knell of learning, and one of the fastest ways to lose the faith and respect of the people that are looking to you for instruction and wisdom.  Yes, the Wikipedia is potentially unreliable, partially because it is a wiki, which means it is open to be edited by anyone.  But it is also unreliable just by virtue of being written by a human being, JUST LIKE THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA.  Warlick makes the incredibly salient point that the Wikipedia is at least honest about its potential for errors, which is more than we can say about virtually any text book. 

Furthermore, I firmly believe that any potential for errors in Wikipedia is out-weighed by the jaw-dropping and mind-numbing scope  and breadth of it all.  The Encyclopedia Britannica would NEVER have been able to tell me the name of the villain in Amazing Spider-Man #347.  Should Wikipedia be the end-all be-all of scholarly research?  Of course not.  But it is a great place to start (As Mark Peplow says toward the end of the NPR piece I link to below), and it has a very good chance of having at least some information on damn near everything.  Being savvy about how to use that information, and when to trust it is precisely the skill that Warlick wants us to impart into our students, and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

Ok, I've gone off on my own little Wiki-whirlwind, so I should just end with a note to listen to this story, which, surprising to nobody, is from NPR:  Assessing Wikipedia's Accuracy

* That was a totally fictionalized account of a Wikipedia tangent, but it's certainly not outside the realm of possibility for things I might wind up looking at in one session.  I just say this so you don't go looking for Amazing Spider-Man #347, only to find it doesn't exist, then come back to me and call me a liar.