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Proposal Suggests UK Students Study Wikipedia and Twitter
An anonymous reader writes "Who needs crusty old rubbish like the Victorian era or World War II? Instead, an Ofsted report leaked to The Guardian details of proposals to teach UK primary school children how to use Wikipedia, Twitter, podcasts and blogs. Presumably they're already au fait with b3ta and 4chan. And you already can't get the kids off Bebo without a crowbar."
It's a stupid idea by people who are trying to appear "down with the kids". I can't think of anything worse to teach children than to use Wikipedia as a primary source of research and to use Twitter as a primary means of communication.
IT teaching in schools needs to improve, but from a technical perspective, not by letting kids spend a couple of hours a week in school doing what they do at home every night anyway. Far more would be gained by teaching kids how to use and administer computers than simply jumping on whatever the current internet bandwagon is and letting kids arse around with it.
It's basically a blog for people who are not able to write enough good stuff for blogs.
"I just took a dump" and other messages are basically the essence of Twitter and I can do exactly the same on a random IRC channel.
Wikipedia on the other hand is more interesting because it shows what perception can do to people and how that combines to an article. I teaches checking the sources instead of simply copypasting your info(although some people still do that).
Twitter has none of those redeeming values and is outside the study of microblogs or something similar(like speed of information) a completely useless research subject.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Well, I'm not really for skipping learning about WWII, but learning how to use Wikipedia and how to blog sound like excellent things to teach kids. Should we really teach kids that knowledge comes from a single authoritarian figure like a teacher, or should we tell them that they need to investigate numerous versions of the view of history?
Learning how to use Wikipedia, including how to read the discussion page sounds fantastic. Take a topic, show how there are a lot of varied opinions about it. Show how consensus is formed and most importantly show that we can't always trust consensus.
Blogging including micro-blogging like Twitter is also a very good idea. It's almost impossible to get kids to see the relevance of writing. Read some blogs. Show how poor writing makes someone look like an idiot. Show how good writing makes someone look smart.
Now granted, they probably won't teach it like that. But they *could* and I think it would be a very good idea.
Teaching them how to admin a linux VM would be more useful.
That's one end node of the tree of knowledge that is computer science / IT. Far better to teach kids how to research and in what situations Wiki and Google are invaluable.
Squirrel!
the 11 year old girl who wants to meet them in a quiet street at 9pm alone probably shouldn't be trusted.
Shit, now you tell me ! :(
Squirrel!
And then came the Grammar Nazis. But for them, we would be able to carry on conversations without pointless interruptions.
Speaking as one who spent about five years as a professional editor, it is perfectly fine to start sentences with conjunctions. Like anything, it shouldn't be overused. But I will take a sentence that begins with "but" over one that inserts "however" as a clause any day. "However" reads weak. Similarly, if you can start a sentence with "and" where the only alternative would be to use a longer word or phrase, go with "and." People use it that way all the time in normal speech, and written text that sounds like natural speech is almost always preferable to a string of long words that were chosen out of a desire to sound "proper."
And by the way, starting sentences with conjunctions is not even a new practice. "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?" It's just difficult to teach young writers to do it properly, which is why most high-school English teachers stick to the (false) rule. Your writing will be better if you don't do it at all than if you do it badly.
Breakfast served all day!
you really think there are many people who know how to google?
lots of people know me for being good at finding things with google, while imo it's just thinking of good keywords and look at the results to see how to modify your search
and yet, it seems i hardly see any people capable of that, so if they could teach kids that google will only support you, and not magically give you an answer on everything from the first try with just about any keyword.
Google will work great if you give it the additional knowledge and insight of your own brain, but by itself it's fairly weak. and it seems very few people seem to understand that...
and frankly, why wouldn't it be good for the next generation to actually be good at finding information on the internet? it'll probably be even far more present than it is for us...
Teach them to read and write then you can teach then Genesis and Gospels. That's all they need to know. The real life isn't on earth.
ohh you are so special!
I always find what I want with Google, here is how I do it.
1) I open the Internet and it always goes to Google for me, I think my son did that. .... Google found it, I click on the first link and I am there
2) I type ebay.com into the box on my screen and click "Google Search"
3) tada
See, you are not the only who knows how to use Google
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