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I have heard many at teachers question the value and integrity of Wikipedia.  Depending on the source you go to, independent studies have found Wikipedia to be 80-90 percent accurate.  When we look at our students and they as individuals get 80-90 percent of the questions correct on a test, we praise them.  Then as teachers we help them find and fix what was incorrect.  How often do we really throw out something that is by majority still good?  Why don’t we do the same with Wikipedia? At our school we have been talking about digital literacy and how important it is to teach our students critical thinking.  Is Wikipedia not the perfect place to do this?  In our classrooms we must be teaching our students to question.

Questioning is central to learning and growing.

-Jamie McKenzie

When our students write for us we always tell them to cite their sources.  Wikipedia tells their authors the same thing.  Any article is only as good as the sources of information that it is built upon.  It does not matter if it comes from Wikipedia, someone’s blog, or a scholarly article, students should be encouraged to question it.

I would encourage all of us to use Wikipedia as a place for information.  As always we need to be asking, where did this information come from?  When students run across incorrect information, what a powerful teaching moment that we have.  Teach them how to FIX the error and how to cite the source of their information.  We need not ban what can be argued as the largest single repository of information, but we must use it wisely.

As for the question should students site Wikipedia in their formal research, I would have to defer to the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, for that answer.  He was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education as saying, “For [goodness] sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”

John Laufer sent me this resource today that is built by Center for History and New Media and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning.  They have set up a digital archive of electronic media about the 9-11 tragedy.  The website presents several different points of view and 1st person experiences around the 9-11 attacks.  They also allow visitors to contribute any type of digital media that documents the history of September 11 and its aftermath.  The email states the archive contains more than 150,000 digital items, a tally that includes more than 40,000 emails and other electronic communications, more than 40,000 first-hand stories, and more than 15,000 digital images.  As this years seniors were only in th 5th grade in 2001, this appears to be a collection worth looking at with our students as we remember this day in American History.

Thanks to a link from Doug Belshaw, a friend of mine on twitter, I found that Google is archiving news articles from major newsprint sources online.  Want to find out what journalists of the time wrote about the Titanic sinking, or articles covering Babe Ruth’s move from Boston to New York.  What did the New York Times report verses the Los Angeles Times?  What did the critics think when Oliver! premiered on Broadway on January 6, 1963?  This is exactly the type of thinking that we want our students to be doing in our classrooms, and now they can.  While not all of these articles are available yet they will be soon.  Check out the post from the Official Google Blog to find out about this project.

Many of you have asked “Do I have to check both accounts now?”  The answer is no.  Just follow a few simple steps and you will get both of your email addresses in outlook on your computer.  Click here to find out how.

I stumbled across this new feature on wikispaces thanks to coolcatteacher on twitter.  When analyzing a page in wikispaces, one of the first things that you look for is the citations. Students must learn how to verify information that they find on the web.  It is equally important that students cite where they find information when publishing on the web.  Wikispaces has just made that task even easier.  (wikispaces runs our private brand wiki)  Students can now place tags around their footnote when publishing on wikispaces, and it will automatically place the footnote on the bottom of the page.  Please include this in your rubrics when grading wiki’s.  A tutorial as to how to place footnotes can be found at the wikispaces blog.

This is the official blog portal for Faith Lutheran Jr/Sr High School.  I am excited to provide teachers this venue to blog with their students.  Blogging can be and is a powerful tool to increase communication and collaboration with the students, their homes, and the rest of the world.  Use the link above to sign up as we embark on this journey together.