Wikis

Students all over the world, when faced with a research question, turn first, and often exclusively, to Wikipedia for answers.  Teachers and Teacher Librarians, while they often rely on Wikipedia in their personal lives, struggle with what to teach their kids about the site.  I came across some interesting information about Wikipedia while reading Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.  In it, Richardson (2010) provides some information about how Wikipedia is edited.  He says that errors are quickly found and corrected, and that the efforts of thousands of people working together to create an accurate source of information lead to a product that is reliable and constantly being updated.

That being said, Wikipedia should probably not be the only source of information that kids learn to rely on.  While It is a convenient and reasonably reliable way to start  looking for information, students should always use more than one source.  I have found the Simple English Wikipedia to be useful in my Grade 4/5 class.  I have my class use it with Google Safe Search by starting from Wikipedia for Kids for a safe search that is at a manageable reading level.  I copied examples of an entry from Wikipedia, and the same entry from Wikipedia for Kids to demonstrate this.

For the amount of information my students need to know on any given topic, Wikipedia for kids would be more than enough.  I would also love to one day have my students do some thorough research, and edit an entry, then follow their entry to see if their own work got edited.  That exercise would give my students a real sense of purpose for their research, as well as a clear idea of how Wikipedia is created.

I have not yet had my class create a wiki, but I have plans to.  Before I missed 7 days of school in a row due to illness and job action, I had set up a wiki for my class to build in Moodle.  It is a built in feature of Moodle, and Moodle provides a secure, private environment in which young students can develop their social networking skills.  After Spring Break, I plan to have my students work together  to create a wiki.  Our next Language Arts unit is poetry: perhaps they could create a wiki with different pages for different poetic forms.  They could include definitions, famous examples, and examples of their own work, as well as audio or video recordings of dramatic readings of poems.  I think that creating a wiki as a collaborative class project would be a fascinating process.  I am not sure how it would work, but I do know that my students and I would learn a lot through the creative, collaborative process. The next step would be to invite another class from another school to join in the process!

Wikis can be useful sources of information, but creating them would challenge my students to work together for an authentic, cooperative purpose.

One more note on Wikipedia:  one of my profs in an earlier course said that a study comparing the accuracy of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica was done, and Wikipedia emerged the victor.  Now I don't know if that is true...maybe I should look it up on Wikipedia...