http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/912227
The first time I heard the word Wikipedia, I thought to myself, Oh, another website I don't care about. My professor was explaining to us that Wikipedia would never be appropriate to use in a legitimate works cited (this was in 2008). I next heard Wikipedia when another professor was asking our opinions of the website. Our class determined that Wikipedia is like the free market of information, and as more people access and update the information it would become more and more accurate. But again I thought to myself, I'm still not sure, better to just stay away. And I did. I didn't use the website for a while, until a friend of mine told me that Wikipedia is a great tool for finding information - check out the references at the bottom of the website. This is my relationship with Wikipedia.
My professor who thought that Wikipedia wasn't credible had a sincere fear of her students being misinformed. In 2008 this made sense, but over the years Wikipedia has made improvements. Now Wikipedia alerts users that this article contradicts itself. As David Warlick pointed out, our text books do not do this! We have to begin thinking outside of the box when we think about where we get our credible resources. When we read resources, it is important to ask questions; who is the author, who published the text, when was it written. We should always be questioning things, and when we do we can learn about the resource that we're using, whether it is online at a site like Wikipedia or a biology text book that was published in 1999 prior to the human genome project being complete.
As I watched the video, I had a memory of middle school and elementary school. Some of my friends had encyclopedias at home. They could access solid information whenever they wanted. I was so jealous! I wanted to have this information at my fingertips. But could you imagine buying an encyclopedia today? By the time your books ship, they will probably be outdated. Sites like Wikipedia makes encyclopedia seem archaic.
Warlick pointed out that Wikipedia enables students to be published authors. How amazing to be seventeen years old and have your work published online. This allows you to get feedback from people all over the world. Warlick also made the point that most of their teachers are not published. In 1968 Andy Warhol said, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." (Yes, I got the exact quote and year from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_minutes_of_fame) Warhol was right, today everyone has an opportunity to experience fame.
Selfishly, I was glad to see his assignment example had to do with a secondary English class. The teacher asked her students to help her get future students interested in Othello by creating movie trailers. In the past, I remember making movies for class but with sites like Youtube, we can share and save the our information easily. I liked the way the teacher presented the idea to the students, using a video!
