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Professors To Ban Students From Citing Wikipedia
Inisheer writes "History professors at Middlebury College are tired of having all their students submit the same bad information on term papers. The culprit: Wikipedia — the user-created encyclopedia that's full of great stuff, and also full of inaccuracies. Now the the entire History department has voted to ban students from citing it as a resource. An outright ban was considered, but dropped because enforcement seemed impossible. Other professors at the school agree, but note that they're also enthusiastic contributors to Wikipedia. The article discusses the valuable role that Wikipedia can play, while also pointed out the need for critical and primary sources in college-level research." What role, if any, do you think Wikipedia should play in education?
We learned in elementary school that you aren't supposed to use an encyclopedia as a source! Especially one freely editable.
Perhaps wikipedia should have peer-reviewed revisions of certain articles.
It would be neat if a group of accredited individuals would be willing to take the time to review certain popular articles and make expert revisions and release a "green" revision of an article. There could be a link on the article page saying, "click here for the peer-reviewed revision from 11-29-06" or something to that nature.
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I think that professors should assign students to contribute to Wikipedia as part of their grade. All entries and modifications should be run passed the professor first, of course, and all factual assertions should be cited - but I think that there is an enormous opportunity to increase the value of both the encyclopedia and the students' educational experience. Learning to write articles and express factual information succinctly is just too important a skill to forgo. Also, if Academia were to become more involved in the quality control of the encyclopedia, they might be more apt to use it.
I hear you on that one. My wife teaches our 10 year old daughter at home. We have felt that it is the best in the long run, because we can tailor her learning to her individual learning style. We also get the added benefit of picking the curriculum. I was actually quite suprised at the number of high quality teaching texts available, which public school systems seem to ignore (probably through sheer laziness of the purchaser). My daughter has the advantage of being able to take science classes with marine biologists at our local aquarium, as well as ecology/botany classes with a wildlife biologist at a local state park.
The issue of one income is a tough one, however I was fortunate enough to A.) never had two incomes (she went to college, then we had a child) and B.) I make a decent living.
I think public schools are just becoming free daycare centers. I am in the fortunate position of having friends who teach in the public school system, at the elementary and high school level, and it makes me thankful that my wife is passionate about teaching our daughter. The problems they have with school administrators/parents/children are unbelievable. It seems that schools are more interested in not getting sued, than actually teaching children.
To anyone in this forum thinking about homeschooling your children, I say it is rewarding, but check your local laws. Some States, here in the US, are quite hostile towards homeschooling, and other States are quite supportive.
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Wikipedia *isn't* a primary source. I doubt that it's even a secondary source. Tertiary or later would be more accurate.
OTOH: What *IS* a primary source? If you're an archaeologist, it's going on a dig, and it's what *YOU* dig up. Then there's what someone you know well claims to have dug up. But do notice that these primary sources are:
1) limited, and
2) not dated.
Well, in chemistry or physics, it's the experiments that you, yourself, have performed. Much more widely replicable, but the subtlties of interpretation are dictated by the texts you have read. (They *SHOULDN'T* determine the result...but I occasionally repeated experiments until I got the results that I *ought* to get.) Texts, again, are not primary sources.
Isaac Asimov was a professor of BioChemistry (at Columbia?) and he wrote an couple of articles on tracing plagerism in textbooks by the errors that they include. Textbooks seems to rarely be primary sources. (My favorite was called "The Sound of Panting". I don't know if it's currently available.)
Stephen J. Gould wrote an article on tracing the heritage of scientific articles by the metaphors that they used. I forget it's title. Again the theme was how rarely articles, books, etc. were written relying solely on primary sources.
So library books aren't primary sources either. Neither textbooks not journal articles. Some of them may be first generation copies, but you can't easily tell. And then there's the cases of scientists with reputations who make up their facts. (Medwar?)
Primary sources are definitely preferable. But when it costs a few million to run the experiment there are few students that can afford them. (I'm thinking Tevatron, etc., here.)
So the question, then, is more "How do you validate the trustworthiness of you data sources?" (After all, that's *why* primary sources are better.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.