From a personal standpoint I have never viewed Wikipedia as
being a reliable source of information because of the fact that the information
gathered can be changed from seemingly anyone on the web. Coming from high
school into college my teachers and professors would forbid me to use this site
as a relative appropriate source of information.
With that sticking principle, I’ve always learned to never
rely on anything from Wikipedia for educational purposes. On a personal level, I absolutely love
Wikipedia and YouTube. I think these sites are more practical approaches for
obtaining a quick source of information at times.
Many times the information that is gained from these popular
websites in is fact truthful of some sort, but you must always use caution.
More increasingly, it seems that these sites are the “go to” places for many
people.
In this day and age, I would say that I might allow my
students to use this site interchangeably with another. Meaning, I wouldn’t allow
them to obtain information from Wikipedia and YouTube wholly. However, I would
allow them to draw information from these sites to an extent. So, if my
students found information they thought was useful or suitable to the learning
environment, I would ask them to prove these facts by relying on notable fact-finding
sites to obtain greater depths of information. More specifically: news sites .org
sites and any other .edu sites.
I absolutely agree with you that corroboration is key.
ReplyDeleteI can tell you, however, that I ran into issues with high school seniors in past years when they were working on their semester-long capstone research projects because they were putting too much trust into .org and .edu sites. Specifically, they were finding student projects linked from .edu sites and actually citing student-posted information in their own research! Some of what they were citing was erroneous. My experience has been that those kinds of sites are just NOT the same in terms of validity and reliability as they were, say, a dozen years ago. After that round of projects, I started spending time every semester working with students so that they could spot typical "red flags" that a site was not kosher. Never assume that they instinctively know the difference. :(
Hi Rebecca,
DeleteThat is certainly interesting to note. You bring up a great point that I hadn't even begun to think about. So what you're stating is that with there being such an overwhelming amount of information that students couldn't tell from what information was actually reliable to what was not?
Not to mention what passes for .org ending notation. The amount of bias in non-profit organizations (just think Planned Parenthood and Right-to-Life organizations, or other politically based sites).
ReplyDeleteThis is another very true point. There are a number of sites which are very bias. Most importantly, they tend to have more of an open dialogue with the content of their information alone. For instance, what they deem most important or suitable for their specific cause.
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