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I was driving my 15 year old to school today when he started complaining about his biology teacher. It seems that Mr. M has deviously warned the kids to avoid Wikipedia. If they attempt to research by going no further than Wikipedia - beware -- he is on to them. He has been known to change the answers to the questions/topics relevant to his class just to catch the lazy student cribbing off of Wikipedia.
I think this is brilliant. In fact, he doesn't even have to know how to change Wikipedia answers in order to have the desired effect. How would the kids know if the pages were changed unless they did their research somewhere else too?
I encourage all teachers everywhere to toss this hazard at their kids and see how many scramble. Just planting the seed of doubt is enough. But if you are even a little literate -- try changing a page and see who falls for it.
Of course, this assumes that the kids have been taught how to do appropriate research and the reasons why Wikipedia is an unreliable source.
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In many ways Wikipedia is a wonderful source for both the novice researcher and the seasoned scholar.
Though I understand the spirit of what this teacher is trying to do - and I'm assuming he stops at the threat and doesn't actually change the page, which is a far more serious problem - making students afraid of Wikipedia isn't how we should go about it. If he's so concerned about his students doing proper research, he'd do far better by creating a resource guide and relevant instruction so it wouldn't occur to them to stop at Wikipedia.
I'm not a fan of intellectual fearmongering - and especially not with K-12 students. Mr. M is advocating a horrendous way to approach the topic of research and the nature of scholarship.
My 10th grader had a similar complaint a few years ago when he learned Wikipedia was not allowed as a resource for schoolwork.
Joanne Jacobs posted about a disagreement regarding this issue that apparently started with Seth Godin coming out in defense of Wikipedia for students. Stuart Buck followed with a post where he argued “. . . it’s impossible to “synthesize ideas” until you’ve looked up and memorized a lot of facts.”
I agree with Buck in that students going to Wikipedia will often be able to forego using a variety of other valuable resources, and thereby lose out on gaining knowledge and developing critical thinking skills.
Last month my son used original government documents and personal letters that he found on the internet to support his position on a debate his class conducted about the Armenian genocide. Now that’s a powerful example of how to use the internet for school assignments.
I'm with the teacher.
(Matthew - you've got to check out the "helicopter parent" dispute I had with a Wikipedia author last year - or was it the year before?)
I don't know about the fear mongering part; Id be surprised if this really is fear mongering. As far as I can tell, some high school teachers create an "engaging" relationship with their students by making threats that aren't really threats, but effective and humorous displays of authority.
C's math teacher is probably like that, and I don't mess with the guy. He is now telling C's class that they are the worst of his two (three?) classes; they're always on the bottom; etc., but they have the best sweaters.
C. eats this up, and his feelings about math are much, much better this year; plus he's able to do much better entirely on his own, which I don't think is unrelated to having a guy teacher who tells the class they collectively stink at math. (Seriously.)
(C. is still going to need serious parent oversight to reach anything resembling proficiency, as I've mentioned.)
I've been told (can't remember now) that Wikipedia is best for people who actually know the subject they're looking up. Ed, for instance, uses Wikipedia any time he's forgotten a fact or figure in his field. He can use Wikipedia, because he can tell that the material is correct.
And, yes, he would agree with Matthew (and with Doug, I believe) that the entries in his field are useful.
I almost never use Wikipedia, because I have no way to vet the content. I lack the background knowledge.
If I do use Wikipedia, I don't trust the definitions and content, but, instead, use the links to start a "hunt" for info about the current state of a field.
It's not that Wikipedia isn't accurate; the problem is that I can't tell whether it's accurate or not. An entry could be brilliant or it could be a hoax; I wouldn't know the difference.
High school kids aren't going to figure out to do what I do, and they're not going to be motivated to do it, either. They're going to use Wikipedia the way I used the World Book Encyclopedia as a kid.
Some of our teachers here are sending kids to Wikipedia to acquire "outside knowledge" about world history, instead of doing the hard work of finding texts for them to read and study.
Here's another thing that gripes me (just to go on and on): why don't schools own encyclopedias?
Or, if they do own encyclopedias, why don't they have the kids use them?
Why don't schools have subscriptions to Lexis Nexis?????
Why don't they have the Bobcat system NYU has? Ed has set me up with his account; I can now pull almost any peer-reviewed article posted online, including articles in popular publications such as New Scientist, Scientific American, and the like.
At $22,000 per pupil spending, I expect to have something beyond Wikipedia made available to my kid.
Wikipedia isn't research; at least, it's not research for a beginner.
Second observation: I think it would be worthwhile to teach a high school student how to use Wikipedia the way I use Wikipedia: as a starting point.
Until I read Hirsch and Willingham, I didn't realize what I do as a nonfiction journalist. I just did it.
My job means I'm always in the role of student; I'm never an expert.
Carolyn (Johnston) asked me "how I read" a couple of times, and my sister once made a comment that stayed with me. I was bugging her to read a book on diets, and she said, "I don't want to read it. I want you to read it and tell me what's in it."
What she meant was that she wanted me to read it the way I read things, which is the way I read for my job. She wanted me to read the book and give her my "take."
This got me thinking.
I finally figured out that what I do as a nonfiction writer is try to figure out a field's schema. I know I can't get all the facts, and I'm overwhelmed by the zillions of facts I'm encountering in the zillions of books and articles I'm plowing through by way of research.
Wikipedia can, often, gives you the field's schema -- or at least gives you useful clues about the field's schema.
I bet if you walked students through the process of starting with Wikipedia and moving on to the links you could give them a feel for what intellectual work is at the student/journalist level.
I would teach students to use Wikipedia in two ways:
1. I would tell them to "find the fight." Who's fighting who [grammatical error intentional], and what are they fighting about? Every field has fights; one of the reasons ed schools are so bad is that they aren't having a fight with each other. When you don't have a fight, you have orthodoxy. (I think)
2. have students find the consensus: What do experts agree on? Or, if a field is so in flux or so contentious that there is no real agreement (last I looked this was true in behavioral/educational approaches to autism) what are they agreeing to disagree on? What question are they fighting over? Typically (IMO) experts who disagree do agree on the issues or questions.
OK, enough.
I'm supposed to be writing.
(Writing my book, not this.)
I think I'm going to pull this out for emphasis.
I'm pretty sure that C's math teacher is repairing some of the damage done by the last two years by telling the class they're "always the worst."
"Mr. X says our class is always the worst" sounds awful.
But it's not awful. It's good.
Can't speak for all the kids in the class, of course, but I'd be surprised if it's bad for the kids who always get 99s on their tests. They'll carry on getting 99s on their tests, and they won't constantly be in the position of being a "have" surrounded by a sea of "have nots," which as far as I can tell isn't fun for middle school kids (or for most people, I'm fairly sure).
The best kids in the class will be the best without having to watch their friends fail. They can watch their friends get Bs & the occasional C while they get A+s. Much better emotionally, I think.
This teacher is turning the kids into a group in a good way, not in a collective punishment way.
He's building some esprit de corps.
I think you're absolutely right about the math teacher - there's nothing wrong with a little bit of playful demonstration of authority and it can be a very positive thing.
When you said the best sweaters, did you mean kids in attractive knits, or kids sitting there getting sweaty and slimy? Honestly, either could be funny, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.
I remember noticing when I read Zing Engelmann's Direct Instruction book that he would frequently play around with students like this - lightly taunting the lower group for being behind the upper group, etc. It's a great thing when done properly.
Competition, despite what they tell you in ed school, can actually be a good thing. Posting the names of the people scoring the highest on the last test can be motivating. In ed school, however, the tendency is to keep all that stuff top secret so no one knows what anyone else got on an assignment or test (without asking the other person, of course).
Barry,
Your comment reminds me of a legal point that, while not really relevant to this discussion, never stops entertaining me.
I've read several times how well-performing districts can't always celebrate to the fullest their achievements on standardized tests when 100% of a group passes.
Why? Because reporting the stat of 100% violates the privacy of the students, of course. Everyone who encountered the number would know how each individual student performed, so 100% becomes 99%. You know, sort of how execution squads have those randomly-assigned dummy bullets to assuage guilt or responsibility.
When you said the best sweaters, did you mean kids in attractive knits, or kids sitting there getting sweaty and slimy? Honestly, either could be funny, so I suppose it doesn't really matter.
Apparently he meant the best sweaters as in sweaters that you wear!
They haven't even worn any sweaters yet.
I'm going to chalk this up to guy humor being inscrutable by me.
Because reporting the stat of 100% violates the privacy of the students, of course. Everyone who encountered the number would know how each individual student performed, so 100% becomes 99%.
Is that true???
And, ummm, second question: are there districts with 100% passing scores?
Competition, despite what they tell you in ed school, can actually be a good thing. Posting the names of the people scoring the highest on the last test can be motivating.
Absolutely, and it does have to be "done well."
The other thing this teacher is doing is setting the two classes in competition, which also works in this context.
He's shaping them into something like a team.
And, sure, constant "group work" can be debilitating, but there's a difference between a group and a team.
I would say that the sum effect of these classroom jokes is that the psychological gap between the "winners" and the "losers" (which is how the school culture tends to make people feel, regardless of intent) is being psychologically narrowed to a range that's probably optimal for everyone, top, middle, and bottom.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that the achievement range will narrow, with the bottom moving up.
Wish I could track that...
I just spent a few minutes looking around for the article... I read about it last over a year ago and remember none of the specifics [like location] - for now it'll have to go unsubstantiated.
I'm a sysop at Wikipedia. (Though not with the account with my real name on it.)
Needless to say, I wouldn't be at all pleased with his actions.
I would simply administer a block on his IP.
Editors can simply revert the error (there are task forces designed to patrol recent changes; bots revert obvious vandalism and errors are often removed in minutes).
And if a person persists in constantly adding intentionally false info (we assume good faith of all editors first), then the block button comes out!
Bear in mind, being an *editor* (I have 20,000+ edits in one of my other accounts) is far different from merely pulling the article off the web, since you would actually have to cite external sources, copyedit, discuss things with other editors and so forth. (In Wikinews, you can also do original reporting if the veracity of your primary sources can be verified -- e.g. interviews can be verified.
Wikipedia is not only just a good starting point, but good for building connections -- how else can you go from math to history to politics to literature to linguistics to acoustics to physics back to math again?
As long as I know what I'm reading, and can check the occasional citation, the biggest detriment Wikipedia does for me is that it can lead you away to a lot of interesting tangential topics. How else do you go from "amine" to "Plasminogen activator inhibitor-1"?
Ed likes Wikipedia.
My experience with the "helicopter parent" page was so obnoxious I turned against the entire enterprise.
The guy who wrote the page told me Wikipedia can only "reflect" reality, not invent it.
How did he know what reality was?
He knew it from reading secondary sources, by which he meant feature articles in newspapers and alumnae magazines. Feature articles say helicopter parents are real; therefore helicopter parents are real.
He didn't seem to know the difference between a primary and a secondary source, nor did he appear to perceive a distinction between a news story and a feature article.
And he had no idea that a blog entry could be a primary source.
As I recall, he gave me a link to a blog entry in which the mother of a young child (Kindergarten or 1st grade iirc) complained about a "news" item on TV chiding parents for being overinvolved with their children's educations. He said I might be interested in reading it, but he himself couldn't use blogs as a source.
Of course, a first-person account written by a parent complaining about media advice to parents is a primary source. Blog entries today are the equivalent of diary entries in the 19th century. They are documents.
I never got over the whole experience.
On purpose.
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