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Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia?
Londovir asks: "Recently, our school board made the decision to block Wikipedia from our school district's WAN system. This was a complete block — there aren't even provisions in place for teachers or administrators to input a password to bypass the restriction. The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools. Should we block sites such as Wikipedia because students may be exposed to misinformation, or should we encourage sites such as Wikipedia as an outlet for students to investigate and determine the validity of the information?"
I would like to see the same board underline how cooperate owned news media, and human written reference material are that much more reliable that partially peer reviewed, but publicly refutable medium. I am in no way denying the obvious problems with Wikipedia.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How about, "the faster we hit rock bottom, the sooner the mobs with pitchforks will rise up?"
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I work in a large school district IT Department. We block plenty of sites, including MySpace and Facebook, (though we don't block Wikipedia).
Generally, the feeling among us here is that if we receive a complain about a website, we will examine it. We won't block non-porn sites until we receive complaints, and the website has to have no educational value for us to consider blocking.
FanFictionRecs.net
You could hit rock bottom a lot faster by asserting your rights, rather than waiving them.
I was explaining that while people here are debating about the good or bad ways that a school district trys to engineer students, the reason has nothing to do with engineering of students, and everything to do with the path of least resistance and least cost. Businesses work on cost-profit ratios, public services work on cost-benefit ratios. I never said it was the way it should be, I said it was the way it is.
I hate working for a public agency personally. I think we do some of the stupidest things for the most arbitrary reasons, and no one here has any focus on what our purpose is supposed to be: education. Especially in IT, which is purely administrative, we very rarely ask if we are doing something because it benefits us or the students.
FanFictionRecs.net
Our school district "blocks" sites like LiveJournal and MySpace. This provides our student body with an excellent education in some branches of computer science - like tunnelling, overseas proxy servers, and anonymous browsing in general.
Besides, to state the obvious, students generally do their homework papers at home - where Wikipedia is freely available.
This is an interesting post. I agree Wikipedia is a pretty accurate source for pure, non-filtered, information. What I don't necessarily agree with is your claims of bias - while I can see the bias toward topics that nerds are often interested in (what's with the huge amounts of articles on anime characters?), I don't see where the claim of liberal bias comes from. With regards to political topics, Wikipedia seems very unbiased, as it should, given its NPOV policy and large amounts of editors with different opinions which are moderated by each other. The result is, as it appears to me, plain facts, unprocessed by the giant propaganda machines. I think thus it's a good utility to moderate anyone's worldview, because the facts are most often less extreme than they are presented elsewhere. (Warning: I'm somewhat drunk right now, and I don't live in the US, which I perceive as being in general much more inclined toward the right in economic matters than the society in which I live.)
Lalala
Education isn't simply about regurgitating facts found elsewhere.
Isn't the POINT of a 'liberal' (in the academic arts sense, not the political sense) education to teach the students to reason, to be able to measure the value of the information they are getting, to filter it as necessary to draw useful conclusions?
Seems to me that Wikipedia is EXACTLY the perfect tool to teach about how information is presented and how one should read with care toward the author's biases and intent. LIKE EVERY OTHER SOURCE OF INFORMATION (such as encyclopedias and books), Wiki authors are generally altruistic in intent but everyone has inherent biases. Further, some are not so altruistic. With books and reference works, the recycle time is long and slow between editions. With wiki it's very fast, sometimes hours. So in a sense Wiki is the 'hothouse' version of every other reference work.
I think it's an excellent educational tool, both as a reference (cited original sources and generally good summaries of knowledge-to-date) and as a meta-example of the potential dangers of simply absorbing facts without thinking critically about their source.
-Styopa
"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.
The largest section of the Records Department, far larger than the one on which Winston worked, consisted simply of persons whose duty it was to track down and collect all copies of books, newspapers, and other documents which had been superseded and were due for destruction. A number of The Times which might, because of changes in political alignment, or mistaken prophecies uttered by Big Brother, have been rewritten a dozen times still stood on the files bearing its original date, and no other copy existed to contradict it. Books, also, were recalled and rewritten again and again, and were invariably reissued without any admission that any alteration had been made.
Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy."
- 1984 by George Orwell.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question