I was planning to use this blog entry to expand upon my positions vis a vis Wikipedia’s suitability as a scholarly resource. But, there’s already a shorter version of what I call The Wikipedia Rant in an earlier weekly reflection post, so I thought instead I’d do some reading outside of the class-assigned readings and see instead if I could find anything that changed my mind.

First, I checked the Wikipedia page on accuracy disputes. I didn’t find anything I wasn’t expecting to see here – Wikipedia tries to push a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) and had several mechanisms for disputing the accuracy of a corpus of text depending on how severe the inaccuracies are.

Next, I found an editorial piece by John F. Kennedy’s former assistant, who experienced what incorrect information on Wikipedia can do to a person. This particular piece presents a chilling picture of the kind of far-reaching effect factual inaccuracies on Wiki can have. This may be a little bit of my bias, but while I’m willing to believe that there are a number of sites who simply scrape data from Wikipedia for content, I have to take this one with a grain of salt. That’s not to say that I do not sympathize with Seigenthaler, who obviously had a lot of problems stem from the inaccurate information being posted to Wikipedia, but I wonder what he would have done had such information been printed in a paper encyclopedia. Which brings me to the next reading…

Wikipedia vs. Britannica – a comparison of the two encyclopedias which describes a recent Nature study of a number of articles in the sciences which found that the average Britannica article had about three factual errors, whereas the average Wikipedia article has about four. That’s pretty impressive, considering the relative sizes of the two encyclopedias – 1.5 million happened in 2006 for Wikipedia (and over 2,000,000 by 2007 according to the next article), whereas Britannica boasts about 100,000 topics. In addition, many of Wikipedia’s “featured articles” are at LEAST on par with Britannica’s standards, though a number of articles still do not meet Wiki’s established conventions, and thus not all Wikipedia articles can be considered as good a source as Britannica.

Comparison of Wikipedia and other encyclopedias for accuracy, breadth, and depth in historical articles. This is the one that really stopped me. I’ll quote directly from the abstract:

Findings – The study did reveal inaccuracies in eight of the nine entries and exposed major flaws in at least two of the nine Wikipedia articles. Overall, Wikipedia’s accuracy rate was 80 percent compared with 95-96 percent accuracy within the other sources. This study does support the claim that Wikipedia is less reliable than other reference resources. Furthermore, the research found at least five unattributed direct quotations and verbatim text from other sources with no citations. (Emphasis mine.)

I have definite plans to go back and read the last item on this list more closely. I’m not entirely convinced of Wikipedia’s unsuitableness as an academic resource just yet, but I’m pretty well convinced now that it is fairly unsuitable as a direct resource as of yet. I still have no plans to change my “check the citations” strategy, since it has built me a number of fairly good bibliographies. I wonder if, as a student, one or more instructors had had me engage in fact-checking a Wikipedia article, how would that have affected my impressions of it?

During week 7 we discussed Connectivism and Participatory learning. I’ve decided, however, to replace this week’s blog post with a discussion on my Midterm Assignment Reality Check (MARC) assignment instead, because good LORD knows I can’t resist the opportunity to devote an entire post for Week 8 to The Wikipedia Rant (more on that later).

For the MARC assignment I chose to assemble articles, write abstracts, and reflect on the process. Behind the jump you can find the text of my reflection on the project; I have also attached a .docx file with my citations and abstracts here, if you’re interested.

more…

I was disappointed to have to miss out on much of my chance to participate in class this week due to some personal issues. I still managed to get through the reading and do a little discussion in the forums.

This week we’re talking about Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open CourseWare (OCW). What does that mean, exactly? Open Educational Resources are freely available resources for educators. Open CourseWare is entire classes available online at places like MIT OpenCourseWare and University of Reddit.

The idea of freely available, customized learning resources is one that I find incredibly exciting. As schools move toward increasingly digital curricula, the idea that courses can be tailored to individual students is, I think, going to grow in prominence. This is incredibly exciting for me. As a student with above-average intelligence, I often found myself bored and un-challenged in classes. In the first grade, my teacher once made me sit in the hallway for reading faster than the other students. I would often ignore math lectures in favor of surreptitiously reading a book once I grasped the concepts. Then, when my teacher would spot me not paying attention and ask me a question in order to call me out on my lack of attention, I would simply repeat the question I was asked to buy enough time to answer it correctly.

Classroom-based learning slowed me down, and because I was in a tiny school district (my graduating class was 36 people), there weren’t many options for me. Oh, to have been able to move at my own pace without disrupting my classmates!

Another reason I like the idea of freely available course content is – education in this country is expensive, and that’s a factor that reinforces the gaps between the upper, middle, and lower classes. I have had countless opportunities available to me because I happened to be smart and hardworking enough to afford to pay for what scholarships didn’t cover, and I have had an excellent education. But I have been incredibly lucky, and many people coming from a similar background don’t ever get the chances I’ve had for one reason or another. These people who don’t have the funding for a traditional college education can still learn a great deal about a great deal without giving up much more than time (though the relative expense and lack of availability of high speed internet and computing equipment remains a barrier to entry for those who could perhaps benefit most from this content). Education needs to be much more egalitarian: a right, rather than a privilege.

This week has been a blast in class! Talking about Open Source Software was already exciting enough, and then! Dr. Bonk assigned us each a prominent figure in the open source movement to role play as, and as anything must when including Richard Stallman, open source software using the GNU license, or not using the GNU license, and other people, it quickly devolved into a lot of terribly fun and surprisingly in-character sniping. I broke character exactly once, to post a link to this xkcd strip, which is a favorite of mine, and inspired this incredible photo of Stallman. So it was that this week I got to combine one of my passions – the open source movement – with one of my favorite hobbies – role playing.

Perhaps my favorite “player character” was Laurie, who was assigned the role of Stallman for the week. I was impressed early on by her quick perception of exactly how Stallman communicates in text, but she continued to be a great source of amusement as she teased discussion out of the other folks. If she had half as much fun writing those posts as I’ve had reading them, she’s had a pretty good week. I also rather enjoyed Dr. Bonk stepping in as the “non-player character” who knows everyone (this is a role playing trope. I played THAT VERY CHARACTER last weekend, except instead of being a mild-mannered academic with a legendary collection of awesome hats, she was a Russian assassin. What a varied and interesting life I get to live!)

Connexions. It doesn’t even look like a word anymore. Then again, neither does Sakai. GNU never did to me.

On a slightly off-topic but related note, I was conspicuously absent from the forums for about two days – Saturday and Sunday – which I spent in Indianapolis, dressed up like an elf, hiking across the snow (literally! About two-thirds of my steps I didn’t sink in AT ALL), and hitting people with a foam sword. Oh, and great role playing, too, though our characters are a bit less tech-savvy. Thanks to my armor, I haven’t slouched in two days. I played hard all weekend, and it was one heck of a fun time, but now I’m exhausted. I hope my responses to people’s posts tomorrow won’t be too late for the fun to continue.

As you might be able to tell, role playing is one of my favorite hobbies. I have Live Action Role Play (LARP) games scheduled… well, to be honest, most weekends of the month. I get the chance to play a lot of cool games based on the White Wolf system (Vampire: the Masquerade and Werewolf: the Apocalypse) here in Bloomington, and then I am lucky to have a large group of friends to game with in Indy, where we play a sword-and-sorcery boffer LARP called Trials of Terra Nova. There’s a game we go to in Michigan that’s also a fantasy setting, but as Michigan is cold, that won’t be happening until May. So, good choice, Dr. Bonk.

As a side note: I’ve got to say, having a blog relating to class is really useful to me because it means I can get off on these only tangentially-connected side stories, of which I have a million. Perhaps I should blog about my other classes as well! Though I don’t think many professors would take kindly to me furiously typing a blog post with a tangent instead of paying attention to the lecture. The game I played this weekend actually is quite notable for its extensive use of various emerging technologies for logistics and communications – in addition to a central repository of files (managed by Google docs, unfortunately, not GitHub), there is a forum and a mailing list, which we can use to discuss things and keep in touch – and in touch with our characters – in between games, which happen once a month.

This week in R685 we’re discussing online and blended learning.

“the smallest institutions have the lowest [online] penetration rates across almost all program categories” (Allen & Seaman, 2005).

I wanted to draw attention to this because I’m guessing there are lots of reasons worth talking about. For example: smaller institutions tend to have smaller staff and smaller budgets to work with, as discussed in the report. There’s more than that, though: the college at which I did my undergraduate offers traditional and distance-learning formats (though even the distance classes are really only online-facilitated at this point), and though it has begun developing an online degree program in recent years, faculty with whom I still correspond on a regular basis tell me that those people in charge of the program are having trouble understanding in what ways online courses differ from traditional courses, so that may be another reason as well.

At least at my small, private, not-for-profit school (my graduating class, 2008, comprised of the entire undergraduate student body, on-campus and off, was less than 200 people), much of the technological things we take for granted at IU just weren’t possible. The first semester online registration was even AVAILABLE for was the fall after I graduated – I had to truck pieces of paper around campus, get four or five different signatures, and then drop everything off with the registrar (uphill, both ways in the snow, blah blah).

Allen & Seaman (2010) seems to support my analysis that part of the problem is a lack of institutional commitment to online course offerings. “[S]chools [that institutionally believe that their online offerings are strategic for their institution and they have fully incorporated online into their formal long-term plan] enroll forty-three percent of all higher education students but educate nearly two-thirds (66 percent) of all online students in fall 2009.” Those schools that don’t “culturally” understand the importance of the technology are going to be slower to adopt the technology.

That said, I’m not sure if I’m convinced that online classes are unilaterally better than face-to-face ones. I love having course materials available 24/7 from anywhere I might happen to be, but on the other hand, one problem brought up by Figlio et. Al (2010) is one that I am already having trouble with, just a few weeks into the semester: “as has been documented at one major four-year institution, last-minute cramming in internet-based courses is rampant (Donovan, Figlio and Rush, 2006)”. Though I’m doing it on a micro-scale, getting my last-minute “cramming” done at the end of the week rather than the semester, I’m just not as active as I like to be in this class. For me, having concrete deadlines is very important, or I have a hard time getting things done. I find it a little funny that, as a person planning to work with teachers to incorporate technology into their classes, I’m having trouble taking an online class – even one as well-designed as this one.

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Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2005). Growing by degrees: Online education in the United States, 2005. Needham, MA: Sloan-C. Retrieved on June 24, 2010,, from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/pdf/growing_by_degrees.pdf

Allen, I. E., & Seaman, J. (2010, November). Class Differences: Online Education in the United States, 2010, The Sloan Consortium. http://sloanconsortium.org/sites/default/files/class_differences.pdf

Figlio, D.N., Rush, M., & Yin, L. (2010, June). Is it Live or is it Internet? Experimental Estimates of the Effects of Online Instruction on Student Learning. National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w16089.pdf?new_window=1

Keeping it short this time, as the readings were a bit sparse this week. E-book and e-reader technology has been something of an area of interest to me for awhile (I think I find myself saying that every week), and I’ve used digital books and papers in every facet of my life: personal, for pleasure reading; professional, for reference (I find it much more convenient to have a searchable database of searchable text than an entire library of manually-indexed paper books); and academic, for classes. I still haven’t made the switch entirely, for a number of reasons.

First, my professors have yet to unilaterally adopt a policy of entirely-online textbooks. I’m very fortunate, however, in that many of my faculty have. This is my fourth semester in graduate school and I have collected a grand total of seven books – or eight, if you count the one that I had previously purchased for an undergraduate class and then kept. Another of those eight textbooks is a book that I purchased a paper copy of for an undergraduate class, then sold back, and then ended up needing again as a graduate student (though there WAS an updated edition). I’ve noticed that even many of my faculty who prefer to grade hard-copies of assignments are switching to electronic materials, freely available via one of IU’s many systems (eReserves, the Oncourse Resources section, etc.). As an IT professional and student at IU I also have access to Books 24×7, a database of technical textbooks, and that has been immensely useful in preventing my cubicle shelves from being clogged down with reference books (I prefer to use that space for tchotchkes instead).

And I’m all for that. I don’t feel sanguine, by contrast, about the idea that I might at some point have to purchase access to an e-textbook. Amazon and other companies have repeatedly proven that they are not of the opinion that you “own” digital copies of their media. One example of this: Amazon recently deleted copies of 1984 and Animal House at the request of the copyright holder. The irony of copies of 1984 disappearing down the “memory hole” is a subject for another post entirely – but it illustrates an important reason, I believe, why academia hasn’t more widely adopted digital textbooks. In addition, the lack of a widely available, standard, open format for ebooks is another huge issue. I once purchased a digital copy of a book for a platform not supporting my iPhone, which is the device on which I do most of my e-book reading. I never ended up reading it in that format – instead, I purchased a redundant, analog copy, which I was able to read unfettered by required software and hardware.

Another thing that I don’t think digital reading will ever be able to reproduce is the sheer sensory experience one has when reading a physical, paper book. There’s a smell, a texture, a sound the pages make when you turn them. My favorite book is Pride and Prejudice – I have a beautiful, leather-bound, gilt-edged copy of it that I take out and read about once a year, and for me the aesthetics of the book add to the experience. It even has one of those little sewn-into-the-binding ribbon bookmarks. While I could, theoretically, get an iPad (or whatever device) case that replicates some of these qualities, it’s just not the same: the weight, the thickness, the sounds are all off.

So for now, I stick to only purchasing (which we will define as “paying a set of US dollars for”) physical copies of the books I want to keep. If I’m not paying for it, as I do with a number of e-books (pro-tip: search for amazon free kindle titles. Discover new authors you might not otherwise), I treat it as a library book – something I have borrowed, but do not own. If I might be upset over losing it, I purchase a physical copy. Amazon hasn’t yet perfected the art of invading people’s homes to steal their books back.

….Okay, now go back and read the first sentence of this post. I think it’s time to admit I have a problem! And that’s my reflection for this week: I start out intending to write these clean, concise blog posts topical to the class sessions, and then I get off on tangents upon tangents.

The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains – Carr

Money Quote: “The evidence suggested, then, that the distinctive neural pathways of experienced Web users had developed because of their Internet use.”

Reaction: This article makes two points. The first is that frequent internet users have a different neural pathway than inexperienced ones. The study cited suggests that only a few hours of searching was enough to rewire the users’ brains. I guess that’s one way to “alter one’s consciousness.

The second point is that hypertext and mixed-media are making it more difficult for us to move information into long term memory by causing us to switch cognitive tasks at such a high rate. I say: there’s an xkcd for that. I still don’t think the internet is making us dumber, though, as this article seems to suggest.

What I Read – Shirky

Money quote: “In general, there’s no real breaking news that matters to me. I don’t have any alerts or notifications on any piece of software I use. My phone is on silent ring, nothing alerts me when I get a Tweet and my e-mail doesn’t tell me when messages arrive.”

I’m finding that increasingly, when I sit down at the computer, notifications are bothering me more and more. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve switched to a Mac or because I use the Mac specifically for work- and class-related tasks, but I’ve found myself turning off increasing numbers of notifications on this machine. I leave them all enabled on my home computer, a Windows machine, because in general when I am using that computer I am either doing non-urgent work, or “play” type activities like games and instant messaging. I still keep e-mail, IM, and Twitter open, but I find myself referring to them less now, and only at natural stopping points in my daily tasks. I also seem to be getting things done faster than I normally would. I think that’s probably important.

Over the course of the semester, in addition to participating in class forum discussions, attending synch sessions, and blogging weekly reflections, we’ve been asked to read a number of shorter articles, or “Tidbits,” and watch a few videos. This is my first set of Tids & Vids – I’ll be keeping track here with a sentence or two for each, so that when it comes time to summarize my readings, I can just refer back to these posts rather than trying to remember.

Tids for Week One (just a little late, since I only just decided to keep track here):

Long Live the Web, Berners-Lee

An eloquent article in defense of net neutrality and freedom of information. Very timely. Money quote: “Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform—a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it.”

Given that much of my academic career has centered around new media journalism, this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I agree with Wikileaks in principle, if not always in practice, because I think that once a government stops being afraid of its citizens, it stops being for its citizens. Though I sometimes wish I felt otherwise, I believe that people have a right to know and a duty to report. I’m also a pretty big proponent of net neutrality, though I fear that Comcast winning the right to charge Netflix extra for bandwidth may have been the first outright shot in the war on the open internet.

Reaching the Last Technology Holdouts at the Front of the Classroom – Young

Money quote: “Every semester a lot of professors’ lectures are essentially reruns because many instructors are too busy to upgrade their classroom methods.”
Bonus second money quote: “The least-wired faculty members make the best advocates for high-tech teaching.”

Assessment: I really liked this article, because it confirmed and solidified a couple of nebulous theories I’d been working on. The first was that it’s a definite issue for technology advocates to convince some teachers to adapt to new techniques. Having had the opportunity to discuss teaching with many of my undergraduate faculty, I heard a number of complaints about other faculty who insisted that what was good enough for THEIR teachers was good enough for their students. Sixty years down the line. The second was that you if you can convince someone who previously disagreed with you that thoughtfully-applied technology that supports and extends the curriculum is the way to go, you’ve just made your own biggest proponent.

And one last bonus money quote: “Technology becomes the handmaiden of the change.” The technology should be there to support the curriculum. The technology should not be there INSTEAD OF the curriculum.

Vid for week one:

“Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business!” – Anderson

Wow. I read this in the issue of Wired it first ran in, my senior year of college, and I remember thinking that it was one of the most amazing, exciting things to think about. I was, at the time, getting ready to begin my job search, which I conducted a great deal of through freely-available job sites such as Monster. I was looking for an apartment, which I did mostly through various free listings online. I was a burgeoning open-source advocate; I was the first person at my college to recommend people make the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox.

I sat here for awhile wondering if recent moves by the major ISPs in the country have affected Anderson’s theory any in the last three years. Even with Comcast charging Netflix extra for bandwidth usage and AT&T asking customers to pay an extra fee to have no extra data, just to use it a different way (iPhone users wishing to use their phone as a tethering device must agree to a bandwidth cap if they did not previously have one, then pay an additional fee for no additional bandwidth per month to do so), free is still a huge sales point. So, while I don’t see bandwidth getting too cheap to meter any time soon, I do see free playing a much bigger role in the world. That’s why I remain an open source advocate and enthusiast.

This week’s readings, or at least the three I chose, were very much about fluencies and skills employees entering the workforce need to have, and all about how the current generation is, in many cases, failing to be even adequate at those things straight out of high school – and in some cases, straight out of a four-year degree program. This includes things like “reading and writing in English” – these studies dealt specifically with the United States workforce – and paints something of a grim picture of today’s youth. It doesn’t seem surprising to me, then, that anytime the topic of teaching digital fluency comes up, teachers protest, “But students need real world skills too!”

First of all, there’s that “digital world / real world” thing again. I still hate that thing. Operating a word processing program is every bit as “real” a skill as reading, math, or critical thinking. In fact, I speak from personal experience that increasing my level of digital fluency has made me better at reading comprehension (by way of giving me a lot of interesting text and not very much time to get through it), math (which is super important in a lot of the games I play in a number of different ways – budgeting, timing, spacial relations, etc.), and critical thinking (learning to write in a programming language helped me to think much more logically about problems I need to solve).

Second of all, I don’t recall ever hearing anyone say, “We need to teach our kids less geography and more Facebook,” or, “Euclidean geometry? Nah, let’s teach them wiki markdown instead.” Technology is an opportunity and a potentially very powerful tool, not a threat. I have difficulty understanding why anyone would think of it that way, though. While I may not be a die-hard transhumanist, chasing after the Singularity, I am a typical millennial (just barely, and I make up for it by being a tech geek like you would not believe) in that I put a lot of trust in technology and I get a lot of value out of it. I don’t, however, think of technology as the be-all, end-all panacea. Curriculum has to be in place first; then, you find ways for the technology to support the curriculum. Then, as a bonus on top of a better-delivered learning experience with the core curriculum, students gain a new bit of digital literacy. This seems like a cut-and-dry win to me.

This week I’d like to reflect on how I use Twitter as an effective tool. I post a lot of content – though I’ve only had my account since 2009, rather late for jumping on the bandwagon, I’ve racked up 5,730 tweets posted. I follow as well as post; I’ve managed to connect with a wide variety of people varying from professional comic book bloggers to a bunch of fascinating academic folks in the city of Bloomington to some of my favorite authors (and of course, a smattering of people I’ve actually met in person before having followed them). Using Twitter I’ve managed to connect with a lot of incredibly smart, interesting folks studying things very similar to my interests, or things I just think are neat. Also using Twitter, I’ve found a lot of incredible opportunities for cool projects to participate in, and a venue for discussing just about any of my interests (it’s as simple as including an appropriate #hashtag). In fact, a couple of nights ago I had a short conversation, via Twitter, with one of my favorite authors about LARP costuming. How cool is that? I’m a sucker for personal, genuine communication, and you’d better believe I am incredibly good at spotting the difference between genuine and fake. Oh, and you wouldn’t believe how many great deals local businesses like the Scholar’s Inn Bakehouse (warning: sound!) or Pizza X (warning: even more obnoxious sound!) are posting on Twitter. Plus, being able to get information about those businesses via their Twitter accounts means I never have to accidentally forget to mute my computer before I visit their site and then have a ringing in my ears for several minutes.

For those of you who have already been reading my blog, I’m going to be blogging here for one of my classes this semester, R685. It’s an online class in the IST program at Indiana University, titled “The World is Open with Web 2.0″ and taught by Dr. Curt Bonk.

There are a couple of things I’d like to focus on here in my blog this semester: the first is reflections on the readings from each week, as I’ve realized that I was much wordier in my forum posts for the class than other students seem to be; the second is different Web 2.0 technologies and the way I use them, and the way I have observed teachers using them in classes.

This week I already said quite a bit about the readings, but I’d like to call attention to, and expand upon, two points I made in my class forums. The first is the implicit assumption that one’s online life is different from one’s “real,” or as I like to call it, “analog,” life. I believe that dichotomy is not only a false one, but a harmful one. As I discussed in our class forums:

This is something that I personally find incredibly unhelpful and potentially harmful; it’s a notion that seems to me to be culturally embedded. Personally, even despite the fact that I argue against this dichotomy whenever possible, I still occasionally catch myself speaking in terms of online versus “real life.” As Oblinger (2008) points out, neo-millenials have spent their entire lives growing up with the internet. There has not been a single semester since the advent of Facebook wherein I did not hear cautionary tales about unwise photo postings having negative impact on a person’s professional life; it is my belief that the notion that “online” is not “real” contributes to the phenomenon.

There’s more I’d like to say about this. As a millennial myself, and someone who has been absolutely fascinated by all the things technology can do from a very young age, I spend a lot of time online. For most of my friends, it is the preferred method of conversation, both because we can have multiple simultaneous conversations and thus stay hyperconnected, and because we all prefer to have a log available of our conversations for future clarification. In discussing this topic with my friends, we all reached a consensus that having synchronous and asynchronous textual communication available to us made us better communicators, rather than being detrimental to us. Naturally, digital literacy is important; we all know when it’s time to turn off the laptops and cell phones and just enjoy being in the same room as one another, but at the same time, it’s not unheard of for any of us to pull out a phone at a shared meal for one reason or another.

Personally, I make myself VERY accessible online. I’ve had the same screenname, or a variant thereof, on every site and messaging service I’ve used since 2002: demented_pants (or demented.pants, or dementedpants, as in this domain name). This means that you can look for one of those three text strings on any of the major social networking sites and probably find a hit. I have never seen anyone with a username similar enough to be confused with mine. I consider it my personal “brand” and I develop my online persona in much the same way I develop my analog persona. That is, I try to come across as competent, professional, but above all accessible. I keep in mind at all times that my online life is beyond a doubt tied to my real identity, and it makes me much more thoughtful about the kinds of things I share. For me, online life IS real life, and that’s not a bad thing. By contrast, someone without the same kind of digital literacy as me might look at the “online” versus “real life” dichotomy that is, by this point, culturally embedded, and assume a level of safety that does not exist – leading to embarrassing photos of people in potentially compromising situations. This is one way in which I think our cultural perceptions of online life actually harm people, particularly the neo-millennial generation.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently suggested that today’s generation of youth will have to change their names to escape their digital past. This speaks volumes to me about the number of missed opportunities to teach our learners about digital literacy – perhaps because we haven’t quite figured out yet how to get the message across. I don’t have solutions, just questions.

The second point that came up both in the readings and in the class discussion, which is also a big pet peeve of mine, is the offhand rejection of Wikipedia as a scholarly source. I cannot count the number of papers I’ve written – mostly as an undergraduate, but very few of which scored any lower than an A- – wherein the first place I went to look for reference ideas was not a library catalog, or Google Scholar, but instead to the Wikipedia article on the topic. I never cite Wikipedia as a source, because most faculty refuse to accept it, but strangely I have never once had a comment that suggested a professor even noticed I was pulling references from Wikipedia. This suggests to me, along with statistics I heard in my Computer-Mediated Communication class last semester (factual errors on Wikipedia are corrected in an average of nine minutes), that Wikipedia absolutely CAN be an acceptable scholarly source, as long as the reader knows how to distinguish carefully-researched and -cited material from something without a single citation which could be factually inaccurate. This is another way in which I believe we are not just underserving, but harming our students by ignoring potential lessons about digital literacy that could prove to be very valuable.

So there it is: my big pet peeve from this week’s readings, and then an admission that may scandalize some of my readers and surprise others not at all. I’d love to hear some thoughts and comments!