Where Do YOU Get Your Information?

It's fun when students make your point for you.

They all know my view on certain websites, namely my skepticism about wikipedia, and know not to rely upon it for any course work for me. It doesn't stop them, however, from looking at it anyway. Nor would I actively discourage them. I'm not against the basic premise of wikipedia per se. To the contrary, a recent study comparing wikipedia to one of the book based encyclopedias found nearly analogous rates of mistakes. The idea of community editing appears largely to work. My resistance is born more from a snob's disdain of encyclopedic sources. I'd rather my students delve deeper into any given topic.

But some of my boys recently showed me the power of manipulation, if you understand how to use such a resource. Earlier this week, I had one of my classes look up criticism about Plato's dialogue, Crito. A group of boys clustered at two school laptops in the corner of the classroom. They alternately were intensely focused, eyes squinting intently at the screens, whispering in serious tones to each other, now and then pointing at some piece of information, and then suddenly breaking into guffaws before quickly composing themselves and returning to their former scholarly attitudes. Trouble.

After about five minutes of this, one of the boys started to say aloud things like, "Hey, this site is awesome," and, "Whoa, it has all the answers to the questions." The other boys vigorously nodded in agreement, one of them lending support with the occasional, "Yeah, really good site, good information." The rest of the class couldn't help but take notice, and a girl next to the boys asked for the url. Not surprisingly, the boys eagerly read off the address. Its source address was wikipedia. At that point, I suspected I knew what the boys were up to, so I typed in the address they had just given the girl, and sure enough, under the heading, Crito, the first paragraph told how Crito was originally Socrates' baker and how the two spent many a long morning sitting in Crito's bakery eating scones and sipping on coffee and discussing philosophy. The paragraph even went as far as to explain that a gingerbread man will choose to be eaten because he will wish to maintain the rules of the bakery because the gingerbread man owes his very existence to the polis--I mean bakery.

Soon, the rest of the class was lapping this up, and one boy asked me about Socrates' gingerbread man example. Another girl asked when gingerbread was invented. My perpetuators, meanwhile, could barely contain their laughter. They were bursting in the corner, some of them turning red trying to contain themselves.

I deemed the time was ripe for a discussion about assessment of sources, and the boys' joke was transformed into a useful lesson. It was an eye-opener for me to realize that, as comfortable with technology as the younger generations are, they don't necessarily comprehend how it all works. So we spent some time looking at how anyone can edit a wikipedia entry, including certain classmates in the corner.

Afterward we corrected the boys' false information. See, community editing does work. In the end.