Hi Brianna,
I do research in American high schools on how students think about information sources. I also do research on social structure and agency in Wikipedia. Put them together and you've got something like the attached symposium abstract, "Information Literacy in the Age of Wikipedia" which will appear at International Conference of the Learning Sciences this summer. It's super short, though. </shameless self-promotion>
I don't know who else has actually done empirical work on this issue with young people and teachers/parents, although there is a lot of punditry out there on all sides of the issue. MacArthur Foundation's digital literacy project is a place to look too. Henry Jenkins has written about Wikipedia and literacy here: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/06/what_wikipedia_can_teach_us_ab.html
Also important to make clear: Wikipedia != wiki. I think it is particularly important for educators to understand wiki is a tool that supports collaborative writing. Some teachers use wiki to support student writing activities in software like moodle or externally hosted sites and already understand this distinction, but you'd be surprised how many people appreciate even this basic information. It helps in understanding what Wikipedia is and how it works.
I have gone to a few teacher conferences specifically to talk about these kinds of issues and am glad to hear of others doing the same! :)
Andrea
_______________________________________________________________ Andrea Forte PhD Candidate, Human-Centered Computing Georgia Institute of Technology http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~aforte
On Feb 19, 2008 12:26 AM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Hello all,
I am thinking to make a submission to a "computers in education" conference, either a non-refereed paper or a "workshop". The audience will be "teachers and teacher educators". Around 600 people will attend. The conference is held every two years. One of the conference themes is "E-learning including information literacy, Web 2.0 and school libraries". At first I thought to do a workshop, but their computer labs have only 15-20 computers, which seems very limited to me. So then it seems like a non-refereed paper is best.
I think a good topic might be '"Safe wiki": Teaching responsible use of Wikipedia', as just like sex, an abstinence-only approach will not be very successful when it comes to students & Wikipedia. ;)
Anyway I figure there may be some people here familiar with this kind of research, although I am not submitting a refereed paper it would still be useful to see what has been done before. I recall the wiki research bibliography - is it still alive? Both http://bibliography.wikimedia.de/ and http://tools.wikimedia.de/~voj/bibliography/ are dead links...
thanks, Brianna
-- They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment: http://modernthings.org/
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