Caswell, Henson, Jensen, and Wiley (2008) mentions a number of Open Educational Resources, including Wikipedia. I got to thinking about Wikipedia and its relationship to other OERs: Does Wikipedia make other OERs unnecessary? Do universities need to worry about creating their own systems and resources? Or can we funnel everything into Wikipedia? This would certainly reduce redundancy and allow a "one-stop shop" approach to informal education. I personally think we should try to aggregate information in one place, and Wikipedia is a great place to do that.
When I want to learn about something new. I go straight to Wikipedia and read the article there. While I am always aware the content there may be inaccurate, I find that, at least 99% of the time, the content is correct and there are references that are directly linked to in the article. I trust Wikipedia, and I find that having to multiple resources is frustrating and not a very good use of my time. I suppose that this is similar to the reason that I like just having Facebook as my exclusive social network. It's more convenient and save me time.
The Caswell et al. article is 7 years old at this point--a lifetime in terms of tech tools and initiatives. I wonder is a lot of the resources they mention have fallen into obscuritity. How has the OER landscape has changed in the past 7 years? Have people come to my point of view that Wikipedia is king and we should aggregate in one place? Or is there still a reason to spread this information out? What does everyone else think?
I'm the same exact way about Wikipedia! My professors in my undergrad were irritated that I used Wikipedia to get more information about the topic. However, some of them were unaware that Wikipedia have been a little strict about backing up information with resources from news articles or research papers
ReplyDeleteI don't think that much has changed in 7 years.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'd say there are no problems with using wikipedia as part of one's information seeking process. I use it all the time. The only problem is when people cite it. And that's not a problem because it is crowdsourced (although folks seem to believe that's the problem), but because it is a secondary source. Secondary sources just are not the way to go in academic writing. So, read it on wikipedia, and if you're working on an academic project and need to cite something, track back their sources, and then use the real deal :)
Wikipedia IS king. I love Wikipedia!
ReplyDeleteFollowing your commenters, I would like to discuss the role of Wikipedia in information searching. Many teachers and professors are staunchly against using Wikipedia. I have taught the role Wikipedia can play.
It's a great first stop just like any encyclopedia. Do not get your information from Wikipedia, but use it to build your background, get search terms, and follow the sources linked at the bottom.