In late August 2008, media outlets like NPR reported that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s page on Wikipedia—the free, online encyclopedia—was favorably edited before the Alaska governor was announced as Senator John McCain’s running mate for the 2008 election. Wikipedia soon limited which users could edit Palin’s page, but the incident highlighted the main issue with the open source, community-edited wiki: it is only as accurate and as impartial as its editors.
The ambiguity of wikis leaves teachers to decide independently if they will accept wikis as official sources for papers and research. While wikis are often ferociously protected for accuracy by their editors, the page could change in between when the student views it and when the teacher reviews the citation (although the history of past versions is available to review). Wikipedia says the articles on its site are edited thousands of times every hour.
Instructor Vicki Davis encourages the use of wikis for her students. The high school computer science teacher’s Horizon Project was nominated for “Best Wiki” in the 2007 Edublog Awards, and she’s been featured in the third version of the national bestseller, “The World is Flat,” by Thomas Friedman.
Rather than using the wiki tool as an official source, she encourages its use as a group communication tool. This, of course, was the original purpose for wikis, which are often used in business and technology fields to compile intellectual property so that it isn’t lost between departments or as employees migrate to other companies.
Davis’s top five ways to use a wiki are:
- Lesson summaries
- Collaboration of notes
- Concept introduction and exploratory projects
- Dissemination of important classroom learning beyond the classroom
- Individual assessment projects
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Posted by: Literature Review | October 28, 2009 at 07:27 AM