This Is Your Education On Wikipedia, Working Drafts Toward A Paper ??? Options

[Jon Awbrey]

I'm going to use this thread to collect previous posts on educational philosophy and educational practice that seem worth preserving, and perhaps even rewriting for wider distribution.

Jon Awbrey

[Jon Awbrey]

Students, Parents, Teachers, Administrators,

People who don't know Wikipedia very well tend to treat it as just another stream of content that passive readers are free to take or leave as they will. If it were really that simple then we might be justified in comparing Wikipedia with the general run of passive content on the Internet and evaluating it on that basis.

But Wikipedia is not like that. It is a Highly Interactive Virtual Environment (a “HIVE” indeed). It combines strong elements of active fantasy and make-believe, like those we find in other brands of interactive fantasy games, with strong elements of pseudo-peer pressure and pseudo-authority emulation, like those we find in ad hoc peer groups and even gangs.

From the very moment a reader first activates an edit button, he or she begins to interact with a population of unknown character and motivation. A minimal responsibility to oneself and one's charges demands that students, parents, teachers, and administrators get to know the character and motivation of that population.

Sincerely yours,

Jon Awbrey
31 Jan 2011 @ 7:28 am