Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
One thing that intrigues me a lot is the number of mentions that service in getting in the media (even mainstream media) in the past weeks. Slashdot, for instance, along with this article has other two in the frontpage (Researchers Can ID Anonymous Twitterers and Build Your Own Open Source Twittering Power Meter.
But it is not only Slashdot. Lance Armstrong is doing it, I heard about it the other day on television, something in the lines of "Lance Armstrong informed the public that it may miss the Giro using this novely service, Twitter". Actually, even Associated press "noticed the trend" (or is propagating a well thought press release, depending on what really happened) and released a list with the nicknames of some of the celebrities that uses the service.
That reminds me of what happened last year, lots and lots of stories (even on Slashdot) about Second Life, how people were making money on Second life, virtual property on Second Life, virtual child abuse on Second Life, and so on and so forth, lots of stories with several things in common: lots of mentions of the service name, stock footage of people using it, a long description of the service in question, fake and minor controversies.
Sometimes I wonder if it is only a fad, a hype that is propagated naturally by the collective hysteria or if there are really people in the Marketing business powerful and competent enough to orchestrate a press campaign so pervasive and organic that looks like genuine public interest.
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...