Interesting to read that founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales has today lambasted educators for trying to ban use of open source information due to its lack of authority.

"You can ban kids from listening to rock 'n' roll music, but they're going to anyway," he added. "It's the same with information, and it's a bad educator that bans their students from reading Wikipedia."

The research project I conducted in June this year already confirmed that our 13-17 year olds had already decided that Wikipedia would be well-used source for learning. 56% of what I call the UK Realtime Generation intend to use Wikipedia for research when at University, and simply, Universities can choose to embrace the concept of Wikis and collaborative information sourcing or face reduced student intake. 67% of our next generation of University students state that technology will play a major role in their choice of University.

Universities must not be afraid of social technologies, but must leverage them to create a closer connection between their students and academics.

Comments

There are currently 3 comments about this blog.

Mandy Shaw, 7 months ago

And here's a site that's doing exactly what I'm talking about. The entertaining monthly newsletter produced by my broadband provider (Zen) comes up trumps again. Have a look at http://www.scitopia.org - 'Scitopia.org searches the entire electronic libraries of the leading voices in major science and technology disciplines and provides relevant results, without the noise of other Internet search engines. More than three million documents, including peer-reviewed journal content and technical conference papers, spanning 150 years of science and technology can be searched through the site.' It's free of charge to the user (there are some unobtrusive advertisements).

Mandy Shaw, 7 months ago

P.S. And publishers, of course. My impression (I am open to correction) is that commercial publishers have zero involvement with open collaboration initiatives such as Wikipedia. Compare this with the much more fruitful relationship between commercial software providers and the open source software community. There are obviously major practical differences (the quality of open source software is much more provable, for starters - it either works or it doesn't), but I wonder what will happen over the next few years?

Mandy Shaw, 7 months ago

I think Wikipedia as a specific source is a bit of a red herring here. Wikipedia is a general purpose encyclopaedia, not a detailed academic source. Certainly when I was 13 (or even 17) I would not have had a clue quite how much complex and detailed information would be involved in a degree course. I would suggest that the key thing here is a discussion of how information sources /in general/ are controlled, contributed to, indexed and accessed, and how their quality is judged. Universities have vast information sources available already to their students, most of them in hardcopy, and some quite possibly indexed only via a card catalogue. The key point, to me, is that neither the potential usefulness nor the quality of this information is in any way related to how easy it is to access. Dissuading students from a 'quick fix' may therefore be a good idea in the short term, but universities and libraries may need to reconsider how all their information is indexed and retrieved, in the medium term, if we are to continue to take advantage of the sum of human knowledge.

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