Week One Bonus Assignment
Maximum grade: 10 points
Due: 11:55 pm, Saturday, Jan. 29
Where: Post your assignment to the class Blog. See instructions below.
Criteria: Review this Discussion Forum Rubric. Use it as a guide for assessing your own work. I will also use it as a scoring guide.
Wikipedia is the most popular, reader-written and edited, online encyclopedia. The name is a combination of the Hawaiian word “wiki” which means “fast” and the word “encyclopedia.” Some call the Wikipedia an irresponsible information source. Some rely on it as a handy reference. What do you think?
Instructions
1. View the video The Word - Wikiality (4:10 min.) What does the word “wikiality” mean?
2. Badke, William. "Stepping Beyond WIKIPEDIA." Educational Leadership 66.6 (2009): 54-58. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 24 Jan. 2010. Badke is the author of Research Strategies, one of our online textbooks. Read the first two pages of the pdf version. Do you agree or disagree with Badke's observation and suggestion? Why or why not?
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Selam Belay
ReplyDeleteWikiality: On Wikipedia, we can creat a reality that we can all agree on...the reality we just agreed on.
Yes I agree with Mr. Badke Williams observation and suggestions.Any body can write on Wikipedia, it might not be accurate. It can be personal opinion or biased information. Mr Badke stated that, it is important to educate students about using online information from the early school. (elementary, middle and high school).
I'm conflicted about Wikipedia. On the one hand, it is a good tool for looking up information quickly. On the other hand, it is a dubious resource because anyone can edit any entry, even if they know nothing about the subject.
ReplyDeleteThe word "wikiality" means that anyone can decide fact (such as the number of elephants in Africa, for example). Fact will be determined by consensus, since reality will be something “that we can all agree on," rather than actual truth.
I agree with Badke that information literacy is perhaps the most important skill to have in the 21st century because of the constant 24/7 barrage of information that we have to deal with in the modern world. Therefore, it is indeed important to teach research skills in schools, so that people know the difference between accurate and false information.
Wikipedia is what is should be a tool to evaluate information that you need, but that is just it a tool. Without properly researching other creditable sources such as a scholarly articles and journals written by professionals in the field, we cannot assume that Wikipedia is the last stop for information. On the other hand, the wiki is useful in the sense that you can read about your inquiry without going too far into the proper research methods that we are accustomed too as students. The problem with only using the Wikipedia as your only source of information is that it only gives you as much information as you want, but it doesn’t help you develop an analysis.
ReplyDeleteThe video tutorial by Bake is exactly what I have learned in collage as the proper way to synthesize data. I do agree with his ideas regarding research and a more advanced way to answer a question and gather data to make a more informational and intelligent conclusion.
I difinately agree with Badke. When you want to get information or quote information form websites which is created and edited by unknown users such as wikipedia, you have to be very critical to their information and should not put absolute trust on them, it's because as the emcee of Colbert Nation said "we can create a reality that we can all agree on". There might be information because many people agree on them, not because it's true.
ReplyDeleteYusuke Izumida
ReplyDeleteI difinately agree with Badke. When you want to get information or quote information form websites which is created and edited by unknown users such as wikipedia, you have to be very critical to their information and should not put absolute trust on them, it's because as the emcee of Colbert Nation said "we can create a reality that we can all agree on". There might be information because many people agree on them, not because it's true.
Courtney VanGuilder
ReplyDeleteWikiality: “- a reality that we can all agree on…the reality we just agreed on”. (Stephen Colbert, July 31, 2006: The Word - Wikiality)
While Wikipedia is a quick information source, it is written by anyone and everyone. The ability to create an entry on any chosen subject, whether factual or not, is disturbing. Because of this freedom to post, I agree with William Badke. I think that it is important to educate our youth on the proper way to research information on all medium levels (text, audio, video, etc.).
Kevin Pedersen
ReplyDeleteTo me Wikiality basically means that if enough people believe something it becomes true.
I do agree with Mr. Badke's points in his article to a point. I use wikipedia all the time, but I know going in that the information may or may not be accurate. I like it because of how quick and easy it is to look something up. However of I wanted to do a factual article I would not be using that site. If people know this going in, I think its a perfectly acceptable way to access information.
Wikiality means some information that is not ture becoming true by many people agreeing with it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Badke's observation and suggestion. Information in internet such as wikipedia might have bunch of informations those are not correct since the materials are written by unkown. People who get information from internet including wikipedia shoule be critical on those inforamation rather than just trusting. He suggested that learning how to use informations from online properly is important to learn in early school.
Stephen Colbert, with his usual irony sandwich, identifies one of the most often criticized problems with Wikipedia: the idea that if we open up the editing of a "universal encyclopedia" to a worldwide audience, what will result is an erosion of accuracy and fidelity with fact, as popular sentiment and the changing fads of meaning overwhelm reality. Thus, "Wikiality": definitions as decided through the decisions of a crowd.
ReplyDeleteIn "Stepping Beyond," William Badke tells us that the proliferation of information sources and the uneven quality, especially as revealed by commercial search engines such as Google, of these sources is connected to a deeper problem: most young people lack what he calls "information literacy". He makes a statement that while perhaps true according to his point of view, needs to be further examined for bias. He says that
"The wide diversity of information
sources available today—compounded
by the common teenage perception that
all information is equally useful and
usable—creates a growing problem. The
typical high school student appropriates
information (inefficiently) from any
number of venues, including YouTube,
podcasts, and so on; mashes it up; and
creates projects with little regard for
quality, accuracy, or the niceties of rules
against plagiarism."
While this is often true, Badke is also not tuning into larger issues in our culture and is laying the blame too much at the so-called "hypothetical teenager". A more pervasive analysis of the problems that are potentially introduced by the "re-constructive' and "de-constructive" cycles of scholarship is beyond the scope of this blog post, but while I agree with Badke that many people, not simply high-school seniors do not have sufficient skills to correctly distinguish and evaluate different types of research sources, he does not identify at all issues such as people's subtle awareness of the constrasting claims of elites, people's desire to rebel against what they might perceive as the hegemony of those perceived elites, for example; nor does he address at all the problems that might make people more accepting of the (at least appearing that way) 'more democratic' means of constructing information references, exemplified by Wikipedia. He does however, admit that Wikipedia, at least when analyzed by the study in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, has been characterized as only slightly less reliable than the vaunted Britannica.
In my own reading on this subject I found an article on the BBC website that was directly applicable to this argument about Wikipedia, information reliability, elite gatekeepers vs the crowd, the mashing up of sources, and the lack of information literacy. In an article entitled "The rise of the web's digital elites," (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8485833.stm), "presenter, social scientist and journalist" Aleks Krotoski asks whether the web has lost its chance to become the democratizing force that many of its early pioneers set out for it to be. Krotoski discusses the conflict between the desire to have democratic forums, characterized by standards of civility evolved through community interaction, that allowed people to establish veracity and reliability in many of the same ways that they do in physical space: through community standards that give people a chance to make rules regarding behavior and to compare and discuss the reliability of information. Much of this is still going on today, but other aspects of human society, rooted in competition, commercial claims, and darker intentions, have made the Internet a much less trust worthy place. Therefore, Alek says, we look to "we rely on friends and family for what to trust and what to believe, but we also look to experts and other people with high social status to point us in the right direction. " Interestingly, he points out in regards to Wikipedia that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, has admitted that "despite being the current poster child of information levelling, 'Wikipedia has explicit hierarchies that determine whose knowledge is more worthy than others'. " Krotoski then goes to the place where the web began, the W3C (Web Consortium) to join the founder of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, for a look at a project that is designed to facilitate the entry into the digital age of young people from Ghana; but in difference to the utopian claims of the W3C proponents, Krotoski watches the Ghanian children searching with their new computers on Google, and sees that the overwhelming number of results to their queries are from non-African sources. After all, the Internet was invented in the U.S and other advanced economies, not in Africa. He asks what kind of bias is transmitted through the fact that the window these children are accessing the world is for the most part, non-African. He concludes that the Internet is highly shaped by the characteristics of contemporary cultures, and that its high ideals are distorted due to unequal rates of access and the means to shape the Internet's dominant institutions.
ReplyDeleteI felt that it was important to include this BBC article because it is a page that is linked to a television series called "Digital Revolutions" that began broadcasting tonight (at 2030 GMT Jan 30 2010 on BBC2 TV). The BBC is a major information provider and channeler, which affects millions of people throughout the world. The fact that the BBC was providing a place for Aleks to comment on this question was apropos to the question that Jennifer Wu asked us to consider. I believe that the "lack of information literacy" is a problem; however, I feel that the social position of information elites as being "rightful gatekeepers" needs to be questioned. For instance, how well did the mainstream media research the veracity of the Bush and Blair administrations (in both the U.S and Britain) claim's that Saddam Hussein was hiding an active program to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the prelude to the second Gulf War? The fact that many failures of fact-checking occurred had a lot to do with the rise of 'blogging' and its influence on the political process in the last eight years, as many people began to turn to alternative sources of commentary and reporting. In fact, we live in a age when there are many types of claims about the "reliability" of information. While Colbert is right in his ironic point that we may stampede like a herd when we are full of a volatile notion to "correct the truth", it is also the case that the Internet provides an unprecedented opportunity to compare the reality claims of different groups and to facilitate the development of much more rapid challenges to dogma. The recent "Climategate" episodes are a great example of this process, I believe: while many of the motives of people who mercilessly criticize climate scientists are suspect, there are some major problems with the scientific claims of the IPCC and its associated scientific bodies. What librarians and information people need to do is to develop an even better model than what has been presented in this class so far of the different ways that people can evaluate the claims and biases of information that is available in today's fast pasted environment, and to help people do this while respecting the desire to challenge existing 'gatekeepers' who may not be worth keeping. We live in an era of almost unprecendented change, and that includes the change in understanding of the world. Librarians will only be able to be seen as relevant and helpful by young people if they can evolve to more of a "chaos theory" model instead of the older "information determinism" model that is implied by some of the kinds of language that is used by William Badke. While his overall objective is much more helpful in the section of his essay (beyond what we were assigned to read), and while I agree that is extremely important that we all learn better how to evaluate sources, we need to be careful that we do not unwitting empower new hidden elites such as those pointed out by Krotoski (in the BBC article I discussed above). I agree with Krotoski that ultimately the Web is a reflection of humanity, and that information literacy needs to be much more cognizant of the deeper changes in people's needs for as Bateson put it so eloquently years ago in his seminal definition: "information -- a difference that makes a difference."
ReplyDeleteAbdu M. Issa
ReplyDeleteLet me star with word wikiality. As the TV anchor explained it "Wikiality" is an internet posted "reality" i.e, an idea which somebody (may not be known who he is) posted and many others refer or quote it with out verifying its correctness.
As Badke clearly stated many young people both in high school and early college years believe that what ever posted on the internet is a valid and creadible source of information. In my openion this is because it is very easy and fast to get infromation fron the internet. It is also very easy to copy paste and edit. As Badke pointed out this can tremendously reduce students capacity to navigate for reliable scholarly information. Acadamic and research writings should base on a credible information. Such credible information can be obtained from scientific researches and investigations only. Scholars and scientists are usually publish their findings in well known scholarly journals and/or books. These journals and books can be in printed or electronic form but they are easy to identify from the bogus ones or at least one has to explore or seek assistance to identify them instead of using any of the online published information.
The more we use unfiltered and unverified information the quality of our knowledge and research output will fall down. This can be a very serious problem for the generations to come. Though sensorship is not a right thing to do as some countries argue and impose (it is even difficult do to on all internet sites),
it is wise to teach students the possible implications of using not verified information.
Kevin Pedersen
ReplyDeleteThis video was pretty cool and the statistics kind of blew my mind, because it made me realize how much the world has changed, even from 15 years ago. To me this video meant that there is a shift in the way we get our information and that it’s important to keep up with this convergence. I think schools need to respond by offering more classes online and other resources online such as ebooks. For me personally I think it’s important to keep up with these changes, without suffering from information overload -- because as were learning knowledge is power, however we choose to define that.