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
Content, Conduct, Culture
Too much commentary on what students learn from Wikipedia stops with the content of articles and fails to examine what students learn from participating in the culture of Wikipedia.
Educators know that education is as much about process as it is about product. They understand that students “learn by doingâ€, by taking part in communities of practice. What do students learn by playing the Wikipedia online game? Answers to that question can be gleaned from those who have participated in the full range of Wikipedia activities and seen how it really operates beneath the surface.
What are the effects of the Wikipedia environment on the critical thinking, information literacy, and research skills of its participants?
The effects of using Wikipedia as a source of information is a research question.
The effects of participating more broadly in Wikipedian activities, from the editing game to the policy-making game, is another research question.
Even a bad source of information and a bad guide to the norms of research methodology can provide object lessons in critical thinking and information literacy — if the user is capable of reflecting on its deficiencies.
Whether Wikipedia helps or hinders the user in gaining that capacity is yet another research question.
Educators are aware that learners have many different paths to knowledge. Among the most obvious are these:
I could repeat all of the things that I have written about Wikipediot Culture over the past 5 years, and all of it would still be true. All that's changed is that the danger to the minds of students and to society at large is even greater today than it was 10 years ago.
Though many emphasize content issues, that is only part of the story. Far worse is the mis-education in the ways of inquiry and the warping of personal character to which even the most well-intentioned participants are eventually subjected.
Academic researchers and journalists on all sides have let us down. They do little more than recycle Wikipediot PR and blow pretty bubbles of wishful theory that are wholly divorced from hard knocks observation of what actually happens on Wikipedia Island on a day to day basis. It begins to look like it may be a decade or so before the real effects of Wikipedia Culture begin to make an impact on the dreamy bubble worlds of academics and media hacks. It won't be pretty — let's hope it won't be too late.
— 10 Jan 2011 • http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899#comment89064
In its impact on the ecology of knowledge, Wikipedia amounts to a non-sustainable exploitation of cultural resources.
Wikipedia is analogous to a multinational timber conglomerate that clear-cuts living forests to crank out its lumber and its pulp, with no understanding of the living system that it sucks on like a destructive parasite.
— 17 Jan 2011 • http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/comments/view?f=/c/a/2011/01/14/BUEM1H8L3D.DTL&plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:e63f1cfd-edca-4c3f-98b3-3160267c6208
Wikipedia culture is fundamentally alien to critical thinking and reflective educational practice. If educators don’t start figuring this out pretty soon, we’re all in a lot of trouble.
— 17 Jan 2011 • http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/as-wikipedia-turns-10-it-focuses-on-ways-to-improve-student-learning/29067#comment-3916
One of the lessons that my teachers impressed on my mind throughout my extended career as a student was that learning static facts is never enough, and even potentially misleading, if one fails to learn the dynamics of inquiry, the means by which that knowledge is produced.
Maybe it didn't have to be, but the way it's turned out in practice, the culture of those who promote Wikipedia is antithetical to everything I learned about learning.
To make matters worse, the media commentary that makes its half-hearted attempts to evaluate Wikipedia focuses almost exclusively on the content, with no appreciation of just how badly participants in Wikipedia culture are being mis-educated about the means that real knowledge-workers use to discover and validate knowledge.
This is a critical failure for any enterprise that claims to be in the business of collecting the sum total of human knowledge.
They do not know the first thing about it.
— 18 Jan 2011 • http://www.statenews.com/index.php/article/2011/01/ten_years_after_founding_wikipedia_helps_hinders_students#comments
— 19 Jan 2011 • http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899#comment90065
— 20 Jan 2011 • http://www.economist.com/comment/805269#comment-805269
The long and short of it is that the longer students participate in editing Wikipedia the more bad habits they will acquire. Wikipedia Culture (WC) is radically different from Academic Culture (AC), and the more time developing personalities spend in WC the more their conduct will depart from the norms of scholarship and citizenship both.
— 19 Jan 2011 • http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899#comment90145
I think we all understand that there are many people of good will who edit Wikipedia. But good will is not what pervades the Wikipedia system as a whole. What pervades Wikipedia over and above everything else is a lack of desire for the truth.
— 20 Jan 2011 • http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899#comment90166
Now, the thing that every generation ought to be thinking about is this: What are you going to do when those Authoritative, Respected, Trustworthy Sources (ARTS) are gone, or darn near impossible to find outside of an ARTS museum? Sure, you say, we'll just put that whole darn ARTS museum online, but who will have the skill and who will you trust to curate it?
— 21 Jan 2011 • http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899#comment90306
Facebook Notes
Re: Lynda Frank, “http://elcerrito.patch.com/articles/should-wikipedia-be-accepted-for-high-school-researchâ€, http://elcerrito.patch.com/, 29 Jan 2011