That was fun.
Onto the serious topic about Wikis. My experience with wikis at UTK was a humbling one. Wikis were 100% off limits, not just in terms of a source, but you weren’t even allowed to LOOK at wikis.
Okay. Maybe UTK wasn’t exactly like 1940′s Germany, but it was pretty close as far as attitudes about wikis go.
Coming to KSU, and experiencing a much more… progressive attitude from a certain special professor toward technology in general (wikis included) has come as a refreshing change of mindset from that which I was used to.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. You’ve gotta take wikis with a grain of salt. Anyone who has spent HOURS pouring over a research paper, making sure authoritative sources were correctly cited KNOWS has blasphemous a wiki page can be: who do these people think they are? Only smart people can possess and divulge smart things, right?
This presents two interesting arguments when discussing the validation of wikis in academia:
1. The positive point: Holistically speaking, wikis are a great way to get lots of information from a great variation of contributing sources. That, and as long as you don’t try to write a PH.D dissertation using nothing but wikipedia, it’s a great, quick way to get information (as long as you take it with a grain of salt).
2. The negative point: Most people are idiots, and the fact that an outlet exists in which any idiot can contribute anything they want, with millions of OTHER idiots using it as a factual source, scares the hell out of me:
Click me: ↓
Cause I’m such a nice guy, and don’t view the rest of humanity as a bunch of monkeys chained to typewriters, I’m leaning my hopes and aspirations as a future teacher toward the positive point.
It seems to be a growing trend in secondary schools, toward a much more holistic, connected academic experience: mixing mathematics courses so that Algebra and Geometry are taught simultaneously, encouraging of individual thought in science via. the invention of new experiments, English texts from a variety of perspectives (rather than the citizenship-indoctrinating Brit Lit./American Lit. canon), etc.
So, I have a lot of hope for wikis, even if the spellchecker doesn’t recognize it as a word yet.
Yes, it’s somewhat counter-intuitive that Wikipedia actually doesn’t dissolve into a chaotic free-for-all of idiotic statements and “facts”…the “tragedy of the commons” notion would lead us to expect such a result. And yet.
Part of what Web 2.0 (or the Read/Write web, if you prefer) does is question certain industrial assumptions from the last 200 years, ideas like privileged/centralized expertise and authority, dualities such as teacher/student and editor/writer, scarcity as the source of value, commodification, copyright, and so on. Interesting stuff. (Lawrence Lessig has progressive stuff to say about that last area if you’re interested.)