Continuing the Search

I am continuing my search to answer the question why use a wiki in education? As I was searching, I stumbled across an article from Time Magazine It's a Wiki, Wiki World by Chris Taylor. (Here is the link: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1066904-1,00.html) This interesting article is about the creator of Wikipedia. For everyone who hasn’t heard of this growing phenomenon, Wikipedia is a wiki encyclopedia that can be edited and added to by people from all over the world. The article outlines the interesting concept that more people are smarter together than a small group of elite. This is the concept that Wikipedia was founded on. The idea that if everyone in the world got together and created an online encyclopedia, it would be far more knowledgeable than any encyclopedias that are created by small groups of people is a different way of thinking about compiling information. I think this is an incredibly interesting concept, because you get very different and diverse perspectives on Wikipedia, because it is edited by so many different types of people. The problem though for educators is that if anyone can edit the encyclopedia than how do you know the information is correct. This is a problem they address in the article. The creator of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, seems to think this problem will solve itself, because the longer Wikipedia is in existence the more people will have an opportunity to edit it and to help make it accurate. However, this inaccuracy poses problems for educators. I recently was discussing with my librarian about making it a part of our library skills class to teach students how to identify good sources on the Internet, because so many of my students will use information off the Internet for projects that is not necessarily from a reliable source. I have begun to not let students use Wikipedia as a source for their papers and projects. I think this article was a great look however about how mainstream wikis have become and how successful this type of format really is. I am beginning to think about the usefulness of wikis in the classroom to create this type of collaborative environment. I saw an idea for having a wiki in which students work together to create a class study guide as they move throughout the semester, so they can use it as a review for the final exam. I thought this was an interesting way to apply the Wikipedia model to the classroom and could be a good reason to use wikis in the classroom, because they foster collaboration and also peer editing. I am going to continue to explore this question for my next posting.