Middlebury College’s Department of History made headlines at the end of January when they announced a ban on the use of Wikipedia as a reference. Later in February, a Classics course at Oberlin College was required to use Wikipedia for a research assignment. These stories are but two of many that have prompted educators across the country to debate the value of Wikipedia as an educational tool. What are it strengths, its limits? When, if ever, is it appropriate to use Wikipedia for research? Should we be using it in the classroom at all?
On Thursday, 29 March 2007, we welcomed Don Wyatt (chair of the Department of History at Middlebury College), Elizabeth Colantoni (Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Oberlin College), Robert Berkman (Visiting Associate Professor at The New School), and Bryan Alexander (Director of Research at NITLE) for what started out as a discussion about Wikipedia in the classroom, but which took a couple of very interesting turns to touch on “malicious misinformation,” student and professor motivation, and other collaborative knowledge-gathering tools.
The podcast will be coming soon…
Making my way through the dozens of emails I get in a day (GeekyMom you win…I think if I got as many emails as you do I think I would just cry), I found this wee gem from a language textbook publishing company:
Dear Professor:
We at (name of publisher) are very excited to extend to you an invitation to put your cultural expertise to work in a meaningful way. We are looking for professors to serve as culture experts on a forthcoming textbook. You will be asked to review text chapters related to your home country (or adopted country!) and comment on the cultural richness and authenticity as well give suggestions for improvement. You will be compensated for your contribution and will receive special reviewer credit upon publication.
If you are interested, please click on the “Participate Now” button to the right. Space is limited to 8 experts per country.
Oh my. One of the reasons I have adopted social software is that if my students need to know about something related to a specific culture, they now have the tools and the means to speak or correspond with people from those places…and as a result they can see that there are many, many sides to a culture… not just something that was written by 8 “experts” who claim knowledge of one place.
It is these “cultural” chapter notes that drove me to blogs in the first place. Here’s why: I am a gringa through and through. I was born in Boston (a place where Latin Americans tell me the “purest English” is spoken 
). Yes I lived in Latin America but that was well before any of my current students were born. (Insert large sigh). I can speak the language but there are current events or the nuances of cultures I simply do not know. I am as as distant from reality as the cultural vignettes that some (not all) of the textbook companies produce. And yet, my students are trained (through years of teacher-centric education) to look to me for “the truth” about, oh, the current political situation in Venezuela, for example.
We need to liberate ourselves from the notion that all learning has to happen in the classroom, with a textbook and with the teacher at the helm. When I did the deep learning exercise with my students, we came to remarkable conclusion: most of their most memorable learning experiences happened outside of the formal academic structure.
Does that mean that we should dispense with classroom teaching? Absolutely not. But what it does mean is that we need to acknowledge that the classroom and the academic calendar restrict us in many many ways. We simply cannot get it all done in 150 minutes per week, and assigning more workbook exercises won’t help. We need to find more time —but meaningful time– for our students to engage with the subject matter.
Through tools such as blogs and Skype, my students found some of their answers. Here are a few examples:
We saw the movie Secuestro Express in class about kidnappings in Venezuela. My students wanted to know if this was a sensationalized view of the Venezuelan reality or not. So they blogged about it…and lo and behold they received responses.
This particular commenter made it a point to visit many of my students’ blogs and leave detailed comments about her perspective on the situation. My students then wanted to know if there was a way to hear another side of her (quite passionate and moving) argument in order to make some comparisons…and once again, Skype connected us with an individual in Venezuela who had a very different opinion about how her country was being led.
Here is something that speaks to the connections these blogs can facilitate: I was cleaning out the spam comments from last year’s blogs and found this comment that arrived after the semester was over. The story this man tells is painful, it is gripping, and yes, it is quite unlike anything we would have found in a textbook….
Did we take these opinions from these native speakers as “the Gospel?” Absolutely not. But hearing and reading other voices, MANY other voices, in the target language provided two tangible results: 1) my students had to stretch and push their language skills to communicate, question, collaborate with these people, something every good conversation class should provide, 2) it provided my class with a variety of perspectives that neither their teacher nor the textbook could have ever provided them, and 3) it gave them much more time on the task in a meaningful and sometimes moving way (If you still have doubts, check out Evie’s extraordinary presentation about her equally extraordinary work in my class at the ELI for some real goosebumps)
To paraphrase what they say on HGTV, as teachers we are limited in our ability to do our jobs well by three things: by time, money, and by our imagination. Good social software is free or inexpensive, it provides an ability for the language to be used in and out and after the classroom, and it opens up learning to unimaginable and extraordinary possibilities.
More to come on what this semester’s students are doing with these tools to help them answer their questions.
Howard Dean showed during his ‘04 presidential campaign just how much influence grassroots networking can have on national politics, and early ‘08 wannabes are following his lead. Sort of. Most of the big names (notable exclusions include Rudy Giuliani) have some kind of social media/software integrated into their campaign websites, but it all seems vaguely half-hearted. For example:
- Barack Obama has a “group staff” blog on the front page of his site which he doesn’t contribute to, directly or indirectly. His site -does- have a community section, which you can’t access without registering an account. That’s a dealbreaker for me. I do, however, get a kick out of some of the groups on his site: Information Technology Professionals for Obama (made up of “IT professional[s] who are excited about Barrack [sic] Obama’s pledge to build the next interstate system of broadband connectivity”), “The Secret” Believers for President Obama, the Obama Book Club, and my personal favorite: Batman Loves Obama.
- Mitt Romney has his own streaming video channel - Mitt TV - made up of short clips of his public appearances. All in all, there’s not much more info than one might get watching cable news channels … but he does get points for including recent blog entries in his news links.
- John Edwards: I don’t even know where to begin. You can check out the
exhaustingexhaustive list of what he calls “Media 2.0″ networks for yourself. - John McCain apparently considers three linked images a blog, is calling his grassroots campaign area “McCainSpace,” and plans to respond to policy questions via YouTube. Because YouTube viewers want talking heads.
I’m disappointed. Finances can make or break a campaign, most of which are chock-full of workers / volunteers who are young and technologically-savvy, and who could really put this stuff to use. So, why wouldn’t candidates jump at the opportunity? ‘Splain me, somebody. Is there a reason other than fear?
This foto was taken at a lovely bookstore/café in Denver…lots of books, lots of comfy chairs where one could get lost in those books. Or maybe not.
This gent found the wireless access point and was off exploring Second Life via his laptop. And yes he was there for quite some time. Apparently this First Life was just not exciting enough….? Does anyone else find this image just a tad bizarre?
Meanwhile, I racked up a huge VISA bill and wanted to do nothing to sit down and -read- my purchases immediately.
ESL-EFL BLOGS. Here you can read what some language teachers from around the world have written in their blogs.
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