Students who use Wikipedia to do homework can skip the laborious fact-finding process and go right to synthesizing ideas, writes Seth Godin.
Selecting the facts is an important part of the process. Finding them shouldn’t be.
That’s a false dichotomy, responds Stuart Buck.
. . . it’s impossible to “synthesize ideas” until you’ve looked up and memorized a lot of facts. And that is one of the main objectives of formal education — to give you a solid grounding in the facts about a particular subject. You also have to know how — and when — to investigate the facts more closely to see if there’s something you’ve missed. There’s no way to learn such skills if you’re used to looking everything up in Wikipedia (whose coverage of pop culture can be amazingly comprehensive but whose articles on various academic topics can be remarkably amateur), or even anywhere online (many sources of information aren’t readily available online yet).
I think it’s fine to use Wikipedia or another encyclopedia as long as the student is not relying on a single pre-digested source.
The issue I have with wikipedia — which has surprisingly good coverage of a lot of my subject — is twofold:
1) My students’ first impulse, when we go to the library for anything (and we have an excellent library), is to google it.
2) My students have little to no ability to discern the reliability of internet sources. A hit on google images is a hit on google images, and I’ve seen ancient sculptures and modern fan art thrown together indiscriminately on the same poster. I’ve seen a student trying to use a Roman reenactor site as a source, not realizing that, although the person described there had the same *name* as the person he was researching, they weren’t the same person or indeed the same millennium (at least he had the grace to be confused about how the information there fit in with other things). They have at best a rudimentary knowledge of what information is in a URL and how this might influence their judgment of a site’s reliability. They don’t tend to notice things like who wrote the page and when. They pretty much just trust stuff on the internet indiscriminately. How, in that context, are they supposed to be able to distinguish quality wikipedia articles from terrible ones?
“By having a broader base of knowledge about the subject”, I suppose, and when we do research I require multiple sources, and generally don’t allow all of them to be computer sources (and google images doesn’t count). But my students are genuinely baffled by this.
Get an Encyclopedia Britanica from your birth year and see how it jibes with today. Try one Wiki and 2 traditional sources, like the New York Times and Newsweek. Somewhere lies the truth.
A question (honest, I don’t know): do schools teach how to do research using the Internet, including determining reliability? After all, if I’m looking up an obscure topic – I had a quick glance at the page for “scholasticism” a couple of weeks ago – I’ll probably start with the wikipedia entry.
For better or worse, people will do most research online, and scrounging through dead-tree archives will only be done if you’re a hardcore scholar looking at relatively obscure sources predating 1980 or so.
Public grade schools, teaching source evaluation? What a joke. If I were in the realm of teaching, I’d ban all Internet research from my classroom for that reason.
But then, I am old school. I still know what it means to “align paper” when it has been loaded via the cylinder.
There’s a cartoon that shows a newly-minted MBA, just hired for his first real job, sitting down at his desk and demanding “Where’s the case?”
In real life, of course, the facts of the “case” do not magically appear; indeed the very existence of the “case” must be constructed. Facts are not collected for you; rather, you have to derive them, often from contradictory data, much of it supplied by people with agendas of their own.
Education in which you need only “synthesize ideas” from prepackaged facts is a poor preparation for this reality.
My son is writing a paper about a court case in 1962, and he found an interesting article about reactions to it: three living Presidents, the article said, opposed the decision, but it didn’t name the three. Two were obvious, but we wondered who the third living President was in 1962. He could have laboriously looked it up in a paper source, but why should he, when Wikipedia is right there? What would be the point of going to paper?
I see no benefit in requiring students to go to books for information that’s available and reliable online. Far better to teach them to evaluate online sources (and paper sources, for that matter). Part of the learning may consist of them mistakenly trusting online sources and learning of their error.
I read the essays of both Seth Godin and Stuart Buck. I find I have much to agree with in both of their articles, and not much to disagree with. But I have a lot more to say about finding facts and synthesizing ideas. So if I may be so bold as to toot my own horn, here’s the link. http://www.brianrude.com/Tchap14.htm
It’s Buck who’s presenting the false dichotomy. Using Wikipedia is not an alternative to memorizing facts. Rather, using Wikipedia is an alternative to going to the library and looking in a book.
No one is advocating using Wikipedia to determine what the number 0.25 is, expressed as a fraction; that would be useless. Students ought to be able to do that in their heads, and Wikipedia probably doesn’t have the answer anyway.
Instead, people are using Wikipedia to find out things that they are not expected to have memorized: what scholasticism is, which US Presidents were still alive in 1962. There’s no virtue to spending time going to the library to determine these facts, when they are available on the Internet.
Interesting discussion.
My own take on Wikipedia: it is a terrific source of information about popular culture circa the last 35 years or so. After that, the quality reliability of information can fade fast. Serious research topics? Save time and trouble, and go to the library. (Horrors! Look up old sources in print?)
Case in point: The study of Old English is, for me, a hobby of occasionally serious amateur interest. Prior to responding here, I checked the Wikipedia entry for Old English. It is surprisingly comprehensive, if superficial — sometimes to a misleading degree.
Other Google entries include a number of websites devoted to the subject, virtually all of which I have visited. Some are excellent; mmany are pretty good.
Bottom line, on topics such as this, nothing beats a serious lesson or three on how to research, and a trip to a good library to check out standard resource books and documents. Among them: The best general overview of Old English and its related languages still resides in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, 11th Edition, published ’round the turn of the 20th century.
Does this mean one should forego the Internet in reserach matters? No. Should one live exclusively in the realm of old stuff, often out of print, and available only through libraries? No, of course not. (I own a copy of the Brittanica 11th — but I admit that is unusual, perhaps even eccentric to some.)
I suspect it DOES mean that there is no alternative to the teaching of serious research skills for college-bound high schoolers.
Bill
“Get an Encyclopedia Britanica from your birth year and see how it jibes with today.”
Get the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911. It’s all been downhill since.
It’s Buck who’s presenting the false dichotomy. Using Wikipedia is not an alternative to memorizing facts.
What I was talking about was Seth Godin’s dichotomy, not mine. He’s the one who said that he wants a doctor who is good at “synthesizing ideas” rather than at “memorizing” facts.