On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 5:50 PM, valerie <vtay...@gmail.com> wrote: << snip >>
> Sigh... Yes, some of our faculty are convinced that Wikipedia and by > association, all wikis, especially those that look like Wikipedia > because they use Mediawiki are evil and populated by gangs of internet > hooligans intent on provide false information to unsuspecting web > users. They explicitly forbid the use of Wikipedia. > > Has anyone else heard of similar credibility issues for WikiEducator > content? Is this something that is limiting adoption of WE learning > objects? > > ..Valerie > > You bring up an interesting point Valarie. As Wikieducators, I think it makes sense for us to cogently explain the difference between look and feel, and content. We also have defenders of Wikipedia among us I'm sure. I don't think it's a teacher's job, whenever confronted with a negative prejudice towards some resource or institution, to simply capitulate and accept some rumor-based verdict. Sometimes one needs to push back and give an alternative point of view. What I might say to a student about Wikipedia is that encyclopedias by their very nature tend to be controversial, as they strive to tell sometimes controversial stories in an authoritative manner. Wikipedia simply takes the lid off and shows us how some entries become contentious, whereas others scoot by with little or no discussion, attract no debates. The public is privy to this process, whereas a more private enterprise reveals less of the internal debate (if there is one -- we have no way of knowing). The problem of authentication, believability, credibility, is not confined to wikis of any description, nor to the Web or the Internet. Misinformation is pervasive and may be propagated by people who simply don't know any better, have no intent to misinform. The institutional role of "teacher" or "educator" should include catching and correcting information where possible, and of course I realize we don't always agree to begin with, about what the truth is -- that's the whole point. So we keep debating, going back and forth, advancing the conversation. That's a learning process we encourage. Finally, I think we should take every opportunity to simply explain with a wiki is, in general terms. Where the idea comes from, what it's history is. Who came up with the idea? What was the first wiki? If I search on Wikieducator about Wikis, what will I find?... This seems a good page: http://wikieducator.org/Wikieducator_tutorial/What_is_a_wiki I've met Ward Cunningham a few times (inventor of the wiki). He's around Portland, Oregon, as is Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux. Lots of open source culture around here, which I'm proud about. On a rather different topic, related to my Python work, I'm interested to what extent WikiEducator pages venture into non-Latin-1 characters (unicode glyphs). I was able to find Hebrew and Arabic on one of the pages. I haven't yet found any examples of Chinese and/or Japanese characters. One of the coolest features of Wikipedia is that a lot of its pages are in other languages: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B5%D0%B3%D0%B0-%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B5%D0%BC%D0%B0_%D1%81%D1%87%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F (sorry for the nasty URL, should work though...) Kirby
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