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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?"
Then turn around and in the students' social studies classes, teach them about free speech and the horrors of censorship. Be sure to explain what rights an American Citizen has and how many people have demonstrated or fought and died for these rights to remain intact.
Then sit back and wait. Wait for the students to put this together and realize that they don't have to put up with your censorship shit.
When someone holds a demonstration, make a big deal about it and herald them for being an American Citizen. Ask the rest of the students why they waived their right to read Wikipedia as free speech. Who cares why they wanted to read it or even whether they wanted to read it all, just ask them why they waived a right they knew they had. Make them think about it.
Then, if you've got enough time, ask yourself why you've been waiving so many rights in the name of The DMCA, The Patriot Act & The Patriot Act II. Why did you waive your rights in the name of national security and the comfort of huge corporations?
Go ahead, take your time.
If you're advocating blocking Wikipedia in a serious manner, please do explain how you're going to--at the same time--teach the students about the rights they have. It will entertain me, the excuses that fascists come up with always have.
"It's for your own good." just doesn't suffice, in my opinion. Who's determining what's "my own good" again? Oh, you want to. Right. It's called 'responsibility' and it comes with living so let the students have a helping of it.
As for the person asking the question, I don't know about you but I went to a high school where the first thing we were taught is that we are responsible for the information we present in a paper. The student is responsible for citing sources & verifying that the source is reliable. If you can't do that, you're going to end up reading The Onion with either hilarious or catastrophic results. This is a valuable life lesson, let the students learn it early when the consequence is a bad grade instead of a lawsuit. If you told the students Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information, give them an F if they use one single reference from it. How can they argue with you, the instructor?
My work here is dung.
Wikipedia is not the only unreliable source of information out there. Hell, blocking it risks creating an atmosphere where students become complacent and trust every source they come across - after all, everything they're exposed to has already been vetted by an external body!
No, we need to teach students how to recognize good sources and bad sources, how to research, and what citation means. Failure to do so will just create yet another generation of research-i-tards that can't find information to save their life.
Wikipedia is probably not that different in accuracy from the textbooks most schools in the U.S. are using. Here's the deal: teachers need to teach critical thinking more than rote memorization of facts. If they're not teaching kids to question the textbooks (and the teachers themselves!), then they're already guilty of what they're afraid of using wikipedia would do.
:)
Wikipedia is *great*, as is the web and internet in general, for nothing more than bringing up aspects of a topic that someone wouldn't suspect even existed. Check out a topic on wikipedia and notice aspects of a topic that wouldn't occur to you - then research those aspects using whatever sources you want.
The advantages of Wikipedia far outweigh any data inaccuracies - that it's constantly updated, and has a far wider range of viewpoints being represented than any textbooks.
If you teach critical thinking to the kids, then you downplay wikipedia's weaknesses while leaving the strengths.
IMO, though, so think about it for yourself.
Geeze, it never ceases to amaze me the chest-thumping some people do about their rights, without even knowing what those rights are. They think their amendments apply to anything except the government, and gives them some right to troll a board or to read Slashdot/Wikipedia/whatever at work/school/whatever.
Learn your _real_ rights, lemming, because believing in such stupidities is how you lose those rights. Since you ask that, yes, ask yourself why so many rights were so easily taken away. Because 90% of the population doesn't even know them. They think the constitution gives them a right to troll a privately own message board, or to slander the neighbour, or to cheat on WoW, or whatever. Joe Random Voter doesn't even comprehend that those rights, or that they apply to the government (au contraire, he thinks his free speech applies to everything _but_ his government), or what they really were supposed to protect. He's too busy exercising his imaginary rights, to care about the _real_ ones.
Here's the actual first amendment text: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Get this:
- It's about laws passed by Congress. Wake me up when Congress makes a law that forbids you to say something at all, not when an IT department blocks Wikipedia on their network. I don't see anywhere there that students are forbidden to read Wikipedia at home, or that police will take anyone to Guantanamo for reading Wikipedia. Just that it's blocked on the school network. That's it.
- It's _only_ about your relationship to the Congress and laws. It doesn't mean anyone else than Congress should have _any_ obligation to you. Not even public schools or government departments owe you jack shit on their premises or network. Whether it's free speech, or the right to peacefully demonstrate, or to petition for redress, get this: noone else has an obligation to provide you with the means or time for it. Your boss or school do not have to participate in a demonstration, don't have to pay for your bandwidth to exercise your free speech, nor let you spend your work/class time surfing the net. They don't have to do _anything_ for you. It doesn't even say they can't fire you for it.
- "freedom of press" only applies to those who own the press. It just says that noone will lock-up the Wikipedia owners for being anti-Bush. It does _not_ say that anyone has an obligation buy and deliver the New York Times to your doorstep, or Wikipedia to your desktop. If your boss or the school principal doesn't want to carry those packets to you, tough shit, it's up to you to get them in your free time.
- sorta unrelated, but that's another confusion that chest-thumpers do: no, it also doesn't mean anyone has to publish or carry your speech either. If you want to see your stuff in print, buy a newspaper. If you want them on a server, buy a server. And if the IT department doesn't route your precious corrections to Wikipedia, tough shit, get your own Internet connection at home.
And spare me the emotional demagogue bullshit about people who died for those rights. Get this: noone fought for your right to have the company's/school's/whatever IT department carry your packets.
And no, aggression, isn't a substitute for competence, btw. Just calling everyone who might disaggree a "fascist" preemptively, doesn't excuse you for not having a clue what you're talking about.
Geeze...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Great! After having just returned from Communist China (where they deliberately block WikiPedia) the USA now has school districts blocking WikiPedia. Woa to all you dimwits who say "This is for the good of the children." What are you thinking??? Part of the 'learning' process is to be able to acquire data and distinguish that which is accurate from that which is misleading. That is what makes us 'human'. If we do not teach our children how to distinguish the truth from made up lies and how to check a theory using multiple alternate sources then we end up cripling our future generations. It is precisely the free and open access to information that we in the USA enjoy (and that China lacks) that makes this country and our students some of the most creative and imaginative in the world. NEVER destroy that freedom!
Wow. You take my breath away. How does one respond to such an incredible warping of the purpose of school? What the hell do TAXPAYERS have to do with it?
I thought school was supposed to be about the education of students, for their benefit, that of their parents, of other citizens, and of society and democracy at large.
Not that I think schools actually do this; I would say on balance they achieve the opposite. But to actually state that the goal of public education is the efficient satisfaction of taxpayers (not citizens, parents, or God-forbid students; learning, citizenship, and the improvement of students are nowhere to be found) is so ass-backwards it's virtually guaranteed to never achieve actual education or fulfill the interests of students.
Of course, to the extent that you're a politico or functionary dependen on an industrial system of public education for your power and income, your characterization of education may be in your personal interest. What you wrote thoroughly confuses the private benefit of public servants with the broader public interest. I sincerely hope this is an accident of your writing and a product of having to cope with an imperfect system, not what you actually believe or practice.
None of which is to argue that schools are better with or without MySpace. Addressing that question requires a much more thorough analysis than the caricature you've presented here: of what we as a society want our schools to achieve, of the degree to which school should be isolated from real life and of the practical questions of how school can teach students to function in their actual lives, of whether it's better to try to change the student than to train the teacher, of the potential and actual nature of social sites (socialization is, after all, one of the main things we want out of schools), and of the practical dimensions of any relevant policy. In other words, I don't have an answer but I don't think you've made an argument.
Reading through the comments here, I see lots of divisiveness, but little actual grasp of reality. 1) Reliability of wikipedia. My litmus test for an encyclopedia is the Tesla/Marconi test. Look at the entries for Marconi and Tesla. If it says that Marconi invented radio, then it's not a reliable source. If it says that Tesla did, it's reliable. This is a point of fact that was settled by the SCOTUS about 60 years ago. Wikipedia gets it right. Most printed encyclopedias I have checked get it wrong. (I used to work for a school district, and part of my duties were to receive in books. I had *lots* of chances to check encyclopedias). 2) 'Learning' is not about regurgitating accepted information. It's about gaining the skills to understand and discriminate good information from bad. Part of the way that a person gains these skills is by occasionally doing the wrong thing and getting corrected. A school district which lays out a policy which (in effect) says 'You may only cite sources of which we approve', is not allowing students the chance to make mistakes--and thereby learn. They are also eliminating the concept of contesting data. (see the following point) 3) Approved sources vs. authoritative sources. When I was in high school, I took a class on WWII. I read the approved textbooks and the approved stories of what happened. As part of the class, I interviewed a WWII veteran--in this case, my father. When comparing the approved text's description of what happened at Monte Casino, and my father's description of what happened, there was a huge disparity. One version was written by historians, peer reviewed, edited, and accepted by the school district. The other version was from someone who was actually there at the time it happened. Which would *you* believe? In school we are taught (by authoritative sources!) that George Washington's teeth were wooden (False-- they were ivory), that Marconi invented the radio (False--it was Nicola Tesla), and that American bravery resulted in the capture of Monte Casino (False--it was the devious and brutal actions of the Sikhs that causes a German surrender). I'm not sure about the last one, but I know that Wikipedia gets the first two correct, where the approved sources get them wrong. The administrations who ban Wikipedia (and other online resources) on the basis of 'validity', are prejudiced. They think that anything in print is, somehow, magically endowed with veracity. Those administrations are wrong. The truth of the matter is that *all* sources of information should be questioned. They should be bounced against other sources and both the similarities and discrepancies should be considered and weighed for value. But schools aren't interested in that. They aren't interested in teaching kids how to think, because teachers aren't rewarded on how well students criticize 'conventional wisdom', and critical and independent thinking doesn't show up well on standardized tests. And before anyone shouts me down, I'm saying this from the perspective of someone who has been on the teaching side of academia--as both a teacher and an administrator--for the better part of 20 years. As a teacher, I welcomed *any* source that could be justified. I will set one instance of 'My dad was there' against a thousand established encyclopedias and history texts.f Wikipedia is full of experts, and they have to defend themselves--constantly--against a host of counter arguments. If that isn't the epitome of peer review, I don't know what is. Oh... and for those who say that sites such as MySpace have no value? Have you seen how many politicians are explaining their platforms via MySpace blogs and profiles? That sounds pretty authoritative to me.