Hintonblogger

There is a great article I came across at Yahoo News, "Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool". I have long been a fan of Wikipedia and it is often the first place I turn to begin the learning process about a particular topic. What has repeatedly surprised me, however, is the particular vehemence that many teachers seem to feel about its use in the classroom. This smacks of the "ivory tower" syndrome to which we, as teachers, can often fall victim. This recent story should be a reminder that most writing exhibits some type of bias either in tone, selection of topic, or otherwise. I'm okay with the fact that Wikipedia is not necessarily a source that has enough inherent validity to be cited in a paper, but that certainly doesn't mean it can't be a useful tool in the learning process.

To the point of the article, however, it was nice to see a university recognize a great benefit that Wikipedia brings to an educational activity, that of relevance and audience. Rather than write a term paper about a topic, what better thing to do than to write that article for the world's open encyclopedia. The students have an instant audience and a significantly more relevant reason to write that article well - especially with over 680 million visits a year.

Consider the educational activities - foreign language students can write (and read) articles about a myriad of topics, social studies students can write, expand, or correct articles about a variety of historical events, or literature students can write an analysis of the books that they are studying (the example from the article above).

I guess the biggest lesson that Wikipedia has taught me is that the new contributive web makes it so our students no longer have to perform just for the audience of one (me the teacher) rather their audience can be truly the world.