Content, Conduct, Culture
Too much commentary on what students learn from Wikipedia stops with the content of articles and fails to examine what students learn from participating in the culture of Wikipedia.
Educators know that education is as much about process as it is about product. They understand that students “learn by doing”, by taking part in communities of practice. What do students learn by playing the Wikipedia online game? Answers to that question can be gleaned from those who have participated in the full range of Wikipedia activities and seen how it really operates beneath the surface.
What are the effects of the Wikipedia environment on the critical thinking, information literacy, and research skills of its participants?
The effects of using Wikipedia as a source of information is a research question.
The effects of participating more broadly in Wikipedian activities, from the editing game to the policy-making game, is another research question.
Even a bad source of information and a bad guide to the norms of research methodology can provide object lessons in critical thinking and information literacy — if
the user is capable of reflecting on its deficiencies.
Whether Wikipedia helps or hinders the user in gaining that capacity is yet another research question.
Educators are aware that learners have many different paths to knowledge. Among the most obvious are these:
- Learning by being told.
- Learning by doing things for oneself.
- Learning by watching what others do.
What do people learn from participating in the full range of activities provided by the Wikipedia website, considered with regard to each of these modes?
Some of the questions that educational researchers would naturally think to ask about the Wikipedia experience are these:
- What do people learn about the ethical norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?
- What do people learn about the intellectual norms of journalism, research, and scholarship?
For example, questions that one might ask under the indicated headings are these:
- What do people learn about the relative values of primary and secondary sources from reading the relevant policy pages in Wikipedia?
- What do people learn about plagiarism from watching what others do in Wikipedia?
— 01 Apr 2008 • IHEWikipedia is irresponsible journalism and irresponsible scholarship
It begins with “editors” giving false names. It continues with influence peddling, organized plagiarism, and the stubborn persistence of false information. It ends with “administrators” bearing false witness against those who criticize it.
People who enter the Wikipedia compound and persist in asking the kinds of questions that responsible journalists and responsible scholars are just naturally bound to ask — they will find that their days in good favor are numbered, unless, of course they stop asking those questions and just “assume good faith”.
If professional journalists and scholars don't start doing their jobs, and this means doing a whole lot more than duping Wikipediot Articles of Faith and recycling Wikipediot PR, then WikiPundits will soon be putting them out of those jobs.
So watch out for that …
— 01 Apr 2008 • IHE