U. Texas Professor encourages Wikipedia use
Andrea Foster writes on the Wired Campus Blog that University of Texas at Dallas professor David Parry encourages his students to use Wikipedia:
“Like it or not, the networked digital archive changes our basis of knowledge,” Mr. Parry writes “and training people for the future is about training them for this shift.”
Parry’s comments come from an article he published in Science Progress, in which he argues that banning Wikipedia isn’t just silly, it’s actually irresponsible.
It is irresponsible for educational institutions not to teach new knowledge technologies…Wikipedia, or more generally the networked archival structure it represents, alters the way in which we create, share, and record knowledge, and thus has rather significant effects on how we approach education across all disciplines, and specifically in technology and science.
Students and teachers alike must understand how systems of knowledge creation and archivization are changing. Encyclopedias are no longer static collections of facts and figures; they are living entities, and the new software changes the rules of expertise.
This is an excellent point, and I would argue that anyone who disputes it will just sound uninformed and out of touch.
On the Wired Campus Blog, commenter Derek says:
I think the most important point David Parry makes in his article is that, thanks to the history and discussion pages, the review process for producing articles is much more transparent than it is for traditional encyclopedias. Instructors can direct students to these pages and engage the students in useful discussions about how knowledge is produced. Furthermore, the barrier for students to actually participate in the production of knowledge is much lower with Wikipedia.
The accuracy of individual entries in Wikipedia is important, sure, but it’s somewhat beside the point. Wikipedia makes visible the process by which knowledge is produced. That features opens the doors to all kinds of educational possibilities.
