Wikipedia Idea
Andy Carvin’s post, “Turning Wikipedia Into an Asset for Schools” is a must read. He says:
“Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups,
with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic.
Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.
Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they
selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on
that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry
on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it?
Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed
about horses on the page.
This is where it gets fun. The group of students breaks down the
content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount
of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the
necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their
way through the list, they’ll find themselves with two possible
outcomes: either they’ll verify that a particular factoid is correct,
or they’ll prove that it’s not. Either way, they’ll generate a paper
trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or
another.
Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates
a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry’s talk page and
present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be
corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections,
with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry
they’ve verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That
way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and
referenced - hopefully with multiple sources.”
Mmmmm. I
like this. Students doing the editing and the research. I hope the
teachers I will be working with at the high school level will like it,
too.
July 15th, 2005 at 2:42 am
At Musselburgh, in Scotland, we are taking part in a collaborative wiki project with seven other schools as part of a celebration of the signing of the Austria State Treaty. it includes a conference of children in Graz, Austria, in October. The wiki is just starting at http://www.as-graz.org, but will allow pupils in the new term to put together joint web presentations and discussions on the theme of living in a Europe without borders.
It should work because it is based on thorough discussion in the classroom first. The danger of wikis is that, without this kind of structured lesson beforehand, the page can begin to tell half-truths or pass opinion off as fact. Wikipedia is full of this kind of error or half-truth.
July 15th, 2005 at 4:14 am
Thanks for the link, Ewan. This collaboration sounds terrific. I look forward to following it. You make really good points about the planning before hand.