WikiInfoLit - Unit 6 Page 3
Integrating Wikipedia Into Your Course
Your students are already using Wikipedia. You probably are too. You can turn this into a conversation that illuminates the complex and nuanced issues of cognitive authority, neutrality, objectivity, etc.
- Bring it up proactively. Use a Wikipedia article as a required reading, or open one in class. Ask, or better yet, encourage your students to ask big questions and explore the answers.
- If a student has disdain for or doubts about Wikipedia, let it be the start of a conversation. Don't let it turn into a black and white debate.
- Have a Wikieditor account and encourage your students to create their own create their own. If you have the luck to discover an error or omission in a Wikipedia article that's relevant to your course, pour over the Talk page, muster up some reliable, published secondary sources, and edit the page yourself as a class activity.
- For topics that are ambiguous or controversial, use the Wikipedia Talk pages to surface open questions and problematic issues.
- Remind students that no encyclopedia, not even a highly reputable academic one like Encyclopedia Britannica, is an acceptable research source for a term paper, because it is a tertiary source (i.e., not original research.)
- Have your students mine Wikipedia bibliographies for more reliable, scholarly information sources.
- Put the mini-lesson plans that you have developed to use!
The point of this mini-course has to be neither to raise Wikipedia up as a reliable scholarly resource on par with the Oxford English Dictionary, nor to condemn it as an Internet junk room of trivia and disinformation. The point of this course is to give you a way to use a cultural phenomenon of our times to help your students acquire sophisticated cognitive skills that they will need to survive and thrive in these times. I hope it has succeeded.