I am enjoying conversations with Linda, our school’s Head Librarian about the value of Wikipedia for student research and using blogs for education purposes. One of her concerns was that many teachers don’t know what Wikipedia is and when students use Wikipedia for research, the content they find is unsubstantiated and editable, thus unverifiable. The teachers not knowing what Wikipedia is just makes the issue more difficult. She was searching for more informatioin on this issue and she accepted my offer of forwarding any material I might have in my blogs or resources.

I have assembled a few articles and posts that I culled from the blogosphere. Her concern about Wikipedia is a topic of great interest to many, so it was more a matter of choosing what articles are most relevant rather where to start.

My first find was David Warlick 2 Cents Worth, the end of journalism video called Epic 20014. The video (only 8 minutes) was used as an introduction for a presentation he made to educators (many where Librarians) at the Illinois Technology Conference for Educators (IL-TCE). His presentation was titled ” Right & Wrong on the Information Highway.

The video is a great provocation of the senses and challenges status quo thinking to the core. A must view for anyone interested in looking into the crystal ball and taking at a peak at the near future. The topic that David presented on didn’t specifically address Linda’s concerns, however I thought it was a useful starting point for my little list of resources.

This is a key part of his post that I felt got at the questions raised by Linda.

What I was really trying to convey to the audience, was that what we look at is not our most important concern, as information specialists — educators. The change that is affecting the greatest impact on every aspect of our jobs is the changing nature of information. Largely because of ICT, information is increasingly digital, networked, and overwhelming. In addition (and more recently), the increased practice of information tagging and XML have further transformed information into something that is for more shapeless, impossible to freeze and contain, less dependable, and, yet, more valuable.

My next find came from Wikipedia. I found a very comprehensive article titled What Wikipedia is Not. The article includes a section titled No Original Research and I think it gets at the key question posed by Linda about students using Wikipedia for research. This was my first close look at Wikipedia’s policies and the article and dispelled some of my assumptions.

Another article came from a post on Darren Kuropatwa’s blog called A Difference. Darren is a math teacher in the K-12 world in Winnipeg. He lists a few of the major writers in his post tilted The Evolution of Teaching and Learning. The reading here covers so much I won’t even try to summarize each author’s work. These writers are impacting Darren’s work and as I slowly go through the articles they are impacting my learning as well.

The next resource that ties into Linda’s question is a blog writtten by a Librarian. I found it poking around in Dave Warlick’s blog roll. It’s called The Shifted Librarian and it is filled with stories of life from an Librarian’s perspective. Sorry for the lack of detail on this blog, however my quick scan left me wanting to go back at a later time. It’s now on my bloglines list.

My last article comes from Dean Sharetski (Saskatchewan educator) at his blog called Ideas and thoughts from an edTech. His article called “Creative Commons for Teachers is pulled from Wes Fryers blog “Moving at the Speed of Creativity“.

Creative Commons for teachers

After my presentation on storytelling, I touched on Creative Commons as a resource for teachers. Wes Fryer does a great job simplying its benefits for students and teachers.

Copyright and intellectual property issues are complex and often ambiguously defined. Unfortunately, it does not appear that copyright law in the United States is going to change substantially in the early 21st century. Before despairing and resolving to give up on student multimedia projects for fear of legal reprisals (or at least the ability to share projects over the Internet via the school website, a blog, or a podcast) teachers as well as students need to learn about Creative Commons. Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org) “is a nonprofit organization that offers flexible copyright licenses for creative works.” Everyone involved in education should be familiar with Creative Commons both as content consumers and content producers, wanting to legally access and use digital content. Whether someone is creating a digital story with PhotoStory3, an enhanced podcast with Garageband3, a PowerPoint presentation, or a narrated online slideshow with BubbleShare, Creative Commons licenses and website search tools can provide clear guidance about acceptable and legal uses of digital content to create and share “derivative works” using these materials. These digital resources can include images, music audio files, movies, or any other type of media.

Read the rest here.

Well this digging around for relevant resources and articles for Linda has given me plenty to read as well. Thanks Linda, for asking me to do this and many thanks to the authors who have written so well on this and many related topics.

Brent Uncategorized