This e-mail showed up in my inbox today:
A few weeks ago, my school began to block Wikipedia. When I asked why, I was told that a student searched how to make pipe bombs. When I asked what they did to him, I was told nothing because they don’t know who did it. [I am back in my old school district as of Sept. and was shocked to find out that we don’t have a student sign-on that allows us to track the student traffic.] When I mentioned that the majority of students use it properly I was told by the school librarian that the information in Wikipedia was not accurate. I shared the article you pointed out during the workshop and she said it meant nothing because she actually found an author misspelled on the site. Today I was told by a superior that she read an article about how bad Wikipedia is. HELP ME FIGHT THEM. I am really getting frustrated. Today a teacher proposed a wonderful class that would allow movie making a student website building. Again my superior said, no because she does not want their content tied to our school site.
Anyone? Anyone?
He (or she?) should tell the librarian that if she thinks that the information of Wikipedia is not accurate, she can colaborate editing it to make it accurate. That’s the whole idea of it, isn’t it?
Um…yeah…and the national newspapers are accurate too? CNN? This is an emerging information source which requires collaborative editing but also some critical thought. It isn’t enough to sit on your pile of dusty books that have been tried and true.
With technology comes the responsibility of learning how to sift through crap and find the accurate pieces: information literacy. Wiki tends to point us in the right direction and offer avenues to further research. Seems to me the librarian needs to understand that part of the job is teaching responsible internet research.
Have your students do a research project on Pluto in the library. Only allow them to use books in the library.
Ask your supervisior why she would want you to teach information that is inaccurate and outdated. Wikipedia definitely isn’t the end-all for research, but you can’t teach Internet literacy if you block information.
I was listening to the radio on the way to work the other morning and they had some breaking news. I listened to the same station on the way home and someone had called in about how the breaking news from the morning was already on Wikipedia.
This is a meaty e-mail and deserves a more complete examination, however, as a starting point I would recommend that we not “FIGHT THEM”.
In Aikido we learn to “blend” with our attacker. Fighting causes defensiveness. When people become defensive they are not open to the “other’s” point of view. The conversation goes nowhere because both parties are interested in being “right”.
Our challenge is to hear the concerns behind their arguments – in this case – primarily student safety and avoiding the risk of litigation.
Given these concerns, maybe we can present a compelling enough case for using these tools that the decision maker is willing to live with the risk. That’s the best of all worlds.
Or, we find ways to make using these tools less of a risk.
There are probably many other approaches to solving the problem; but in my experience it’s important to respect the “other’s” point of view, even if we whole heartedly disagree with it.
It is from this place that we can find a solution that is “owned” by both parties.
Hi Will,
Control and constraint is something of a tradition in many schools. Filtering is essential in schools, but it shouldn’t be so risk averse that it throws the baby out with the bathwater.
Children will push the boundaries – that is the nature of childhood. The answer is to educate children in discernment and critical thinking, so that sources can be questioned in the same way as other media.
Most kids do not face the same constraints when online at home, and over-protection amplifies a child’s perception of school being out of touch with modern life.
I guess if you don’t do anything, then you can’t do anything wrong! My most important lessons have been my mistakes.
As my daughter put it, “… we’re not fragile!”
Don’t fight your librarian. Work with her.
There is an excellent lesson plan on the New York Times website about using Wikipedia in a smart way. It asks students to research and write a short article, but include two mistakes. Then the students trade articles and use research resources to find the mistakes in each other’s articles. It teaches students that just because something is written, or accessed in a library, does not mean that we can automatically trust it. Educated people check their sources! What a great lesson to teach students.
Last year, my librarian and I used this lesson plan with our students, and we also gave students a tour of Wikipedia and its features. We showed them how to look at the discussion of a page, how to look at a page history, and how to use that information. Maybe collaborating on a lesson like this with your librarian will set her mind at ease.
When I did my teacher-training more than a quarter of a century ago, I and my fellow students were tutored by a man who had two main pastimes: one was steam locomotives, and the other involved searching Encyclopedia Britannica for mistakes. He was then in middle age and had been pursuing his idisosyncratic hobby since his 20s. He had never run out of material to satisfy his searches.
Any ‘librarian’ who believes that students should only be allowed access to ‘accurate’ material is a fool, and is most definitely not a librarian.
Oh, but what fun my tutor from so long ago would have had – might still be having! – with Wikipedia!
So it is okay to break federal guidelines such as those found in NCLB concerning technology and student proficiency? Wonder what that would do to federal funds if it was ever monitored? I know. I’m dreaming here.
Interesting timing. I just posted a blog entry on Spiral Notebook (George Lucas Ed Foundation blog) about this.
Please visit http://www.edutopia.org/community/spiralnotebook/?p=190
After our discussion yesterday with Dean and Will and the posts of others, I believe we need to insist those who are opposing this cultural shift begin a discussion and be prepared for their opposition to it. Case in point, my own thoughts about this have changed in the past few weeks as I’ve spent time looking at my own teaching in light of what is being written about these changes only to see that there is less and less that I can use to counter the arguments being made. We need to give others this same opportunity – to see the changes that can occur by introducing them to the information. Have your librarian check out some other librarians that are using the web http://freerangelibrarian.com/ so that she can see the possibilities. As for the supervisor, you can invite them in to have a discussion about what they see as the risks so that you can address them. Keep asking others about the conversation and showing them the important things that are going on of which educators and, those who work in schools, need to be aware. Look for supports in your building, build networks and, when you reach 10 on the frustration scale, ask others for help. There are no magic answers and, according to Will whose wand is broken, there won’t be any quick solutions but we need to continue to address these issues and make them central in the conversations about students and education.
I would suggest tht this person share this link: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_wales
It’s Jimmy Wales talking about the mission of wikipedia as well as how it works. Very informative.
I would also suggest, as someone had noted some time ago, that web pages are not only valuable for the content on the page, but for the links on the pages, as well, and there are usually excellent links in wikipedia articles.
Finally, I’d quote another librarian in our area as she contributed to a discussion thread of all librarians. “Get over it! It’s here. The kids will use it at home even if block it here. So, the best thing we can do is help them to understand the difference between primary sources and this type of source.” She went on to say that this is a PERFECT topic for librarians if they can work with the teachers to get the kids into he library to TEACH them about the site.
This should also remind us to have those examples ready. You know where the examples of great Wiki pages are. Where has someone explained their value … um … um… oh, how about Will’s book? How about Cool Cat Teacher Blog? Someone probably even has an example of how their class did edit a Wiki page and had to do all that analyzing, questioning, editing …
Give the librarian a copy of The Long Tail and have her read the chapter about Wikipedia (or see Anderson’s blog at http://www.thelongtail.com/). As a librarian myself, the power of Wikipedia are the entries that you can’t find anywhere else. It is a valid source of information that is not available in other sources. Wikipedia is a good starting point for the kind of research that takes place in K-12 schools.
Shouldn’t we focus on the reasons why a student would want to make a pipe bomb? Isn’t that somehow more relevant than discovering where the inforation came from?
I love wikepedia more than I ever thought possible. And as for mispelling, I’ve read novels which have had atrocious grammar errors in them, (which well-respected publishers have missed) but I don’t see educators saying that they’re useless!
The first suggestion to have the librarian correct misinforation is great. That is what wikipedia is all about.
This is policy-making issue. The teacher needs to work to see that a committee is formed that would help establish policies, goals, budgets, etc. (See http://www.doug-johnson.com/dougwri/policy.html).
Any time a policy is made unilaterally, whether by a librarian, a tech, an administrator, it will cause resentment. I’ve always found that these sorts of decisions need to be made collaboratively.
All the best and good luck!
Doug
Great comments – I agree that we don’t “Fight Them,” but listen and hope they will see our point of view. This comes down to the fundamental thing missing in education – effective communication. It is our professional and moral obligation as educators to learn about these technologies and make them work – that is if we truly want our students to be able to compete in a global economy. As educators, we need to educate – not only our students, but our colleagues and district leaders as well. There is too much great technology out there, including Wikipedia, that should not be blocked!
A solution could be to present to your librarian and principal some professional literature on the matter. A copy of the compilation titled “Coming of Age” should do. Page 83-89 is the most relevant. Particularly relevant is the stat that Wikipedia has approximately 4 mistakes per article while the Encyclopedia Britanica has three. The compilation can be found on Ewan McIntosh’s blog. It can also be found here:
http://fullmeasure.co.uk/Coming_of_age_v1-2.pdf
Good Luck!
I appreciate the “don’t fight them/work with them” type comments as I am a relatively new K-5 librarian. 8]
My frustration–a system that doesn’t provide for spending the time to work with the kids on effective research skills. (Does this change at the secondary level?) I totally agree that we ALL, students and faculty alike, have to regularly evaluate our information sources. This is something any literate individual needs to be able to do. Hence, I continue to talk about this to everyone who will listen whenever they’ll listen. But so far these skills are not SPECIFICALLY printed in our state-mandated on curriculum. Those of us who read blogs like this know, of course, that it is all integrated; but, until it is on “the test” not everyone will pay attention. They are all just trying to keep their heads above water. And the large school district I work for? The people who decide what gets “blocked” are not even educators. They work in a central office. Librarians have no say in the matter. Classroom teachers and administrators have no say in the matter. ALL blogs are blocked. Wikispaces is blocked. Wikipedia is not blocked. Yet. Will it be the first place I direct kids? Until I can get fifth graders for more than two fifty minute periods once or twice a year … honestly, probably not. I’ll stick with the EB Online that, while on average may have only one less mistake per article that Wikipedia, is still the more immediately accurate of the two.
The librarians in this area have, of course, chimed in on this topic and one of them finally said, “Get over it. They’re going to use it. The only thing you can do is help to teach them the difference between primary sources, secondary sources, and the like.”
Blocking a site because you don’t like it is different than blocking an inappropriate site, and I would hope that schools don’t go down that path.
Finally, I would give those librarians this link: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_wales
That is Jimmy Wales himself telling about the philosophy and inner workings of wikipedia. Perhaps they won’t be so quick to block it if they knew more about it.
I’m a librarian as well. I’d recommend the excellent article that appeared in the New Yorker (sometime between June and September–I’d look it up but I have Christmas tree sap all over me and am just here for a moment!) on wikipedia.
I also agree with the comment above–students will use tools they find useful and we just make ourselves irrelevant if we don’t “get it.”
We should be teaching them how to evaluate the tools they use and how to think critically. That skill they can take forward and apply to anything they deal with in the future.
The breadth and currency of wikipedia is one of its strengths and partly why so many students use it, a point which the New Yorker article drives home. Several of our teachers shared the article with their class as a way of deepening the discussion about this.
I already see our students moving on–now that Wikipedia is getting more mainstream use, our students are moving onto other things. Funny how that works…
The New Yorker article which is an excellent article can be found athttp://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact and should be compulsory reading for any teacher or teacher librarian who is dealing with research, (and that’s just about all of us :).
So true about students moving on and following trendy sources though.. makes you wonder how far apart some teachers and students will be in a few years time?
You should see the reaction I got when I put the iChat server online. Lead balloons went up all over the place. Principal said it was a time waster. No, email is a time waster! iChat is quick and painless. She is worried that people will misuse it…
and they cannot misuse email, or the Internet, or the phones in their rooms?
grrrrr.