Thing 18: Critical Thinking Reflection

Caring about free reliable information

Thing 14 – 18 in a nutshell was about giving me an opportunity to think about the reliability of information that is shared freely on the internet and my attitude to it. It also made me think about my digital footprint.  

Working in a secondary school has probably clouded my judgement.  I can be negative about student's and teacher's use of wikipedia. Sometimes it is the starting and ending point of the research component.  It is then just a case of copy and paste, present,  job done!! 
I would advocate that it is a good starting point. I often use it myself as a starting point for topics I am unfamiliar with to build appropriate vocabulary to aid my searching.  On a bad day I am guilty of subscribing to Colbert v Wikipedia (2007) a somewhat dated assessment of wikipedia's editing standards. 

Is it CRAPP?

The Colbert sketch gets the point across very effectively, a point that is not as true as I would have thought having delved into Wikipedia's editing tools and tried the citation hunt in Task 15.  I decided to attempt to find a reliable source that could support a statement on an article about Derry Airport!  Adding a citation using Wikipedia’s cite generator made it simple to format. A reference from any url, DOI or ISBN.  I choose an online newspaper article but got scared and didn't click publish.  The editing ability has been tightened up considerably since Colbert.  More importantly the task made me question how good am I at evaluating information? My remit is literacy and all that encompasses.  In school the internet is probably "the educational tool" of the moment.  We use it for teaching and learning and more recently for communicating with our colleagues and students.  I now need to focus on  online reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.  I teach and use a strategy know as  "The Think-Aloud Approach" 

I was curious about other people's attitude to wikipedia  I asked someone I know who works in an academic library in New York did they use it in their teaching.  Their response was:

 "No I'm not involved enough with students to use Wikipedia  the most I do is talk about it as a source of information.  Most of the faculty that mention it in my presence do so negatively as an inappropriate source for term papers, but lately one surprised me with a far more nuanced approach.  As for me, I praise it as a great place to start research."

So attitudes to Wikipedia are changing.  I am changing....

Wikipedia helps immigrants learn Swedish
The task made me remember some good presentations I had seen at conferences from people who use Wikipedia  productively and creatively.  I recall seeing something about Sweden having a children's Wikipedia written in simple Swedish that was written at least in part by students.  The challenge is to find topics of interest that are insufficiently addressed, so items of local interest, local history and geography, local fashion maybe and then there is the difficulty of identifying good sources.  If you can find the right topics or maybe our students could identify them?  It could be  an amazing teaching and learning experience!  Perhaps activities like this will be included in the new curriculum.

Going back to that Swedish teacher  I heard her speak about her wiki projects, she was working in a fairly unusual situation.  Her students (second level) including immigrants with fluency in a middle eastern language were eager to use their language skills to improve access to information about their homelands.  So they translated and edited entries from non-english Wikipedia to English (or probably swedish.....?) So the students were able to create content in previously unaddressed topics.  She talked about how heavily politicized Wikipedia entries were in the middle east.  I think the idea being that students were supposed to be writing more neutral stuff.  I loved the idea that the students were able and took pride in sharing their own knowledge.  

So then I had to go look ........  Task 15 was thought provoking.  I know I need to exercise my own critical thinking skills and challenge myself and maybe even consider seriously contributing to wikipedia 

Task 16 to 17 made me think, but less critically.  My digital footprint we had touched on earlier in the course.  You can read about that here  

"We are living online, but have yet to realize the implications of doing so.  One of those implications our tracks through the digital sand are eternal." 

                    (John Battelle,  New York Times. June 17 2006)