Hi Dan,
I have to disagree a bit I'm afraid. Before I discovered Wikipedia my
internet maths bible was
www.mathworld.wolfram.com, a pretty comprehensive
maths encyclopaedia. Now, revising for my final university maths exams I
probably use both Wolfram and Wikipedia with about equal frequency. I trust
Wikipedia's content because I know that lots of the maths related articles
have been looked over (or created) by users like Michael Hardy and Axel
Boldt. From their contributions it's clear that they know what they're
talking about (there's other users I could mention here).
I'm not convinced that Wikipedia's fallability is such a bad thing, it's a
good demonstration of the fact that you should never base something entirely
on one source. If I'm trying to understand a maths topic I'll generally look
it up on Wikipedia, Wolfram, the books on my shelves and the notes from my
lectures. None of these sources are perfect (sadly, especially my lecture
notes) but often the different explanations between the four can shed light
on the topic.
Also, I don't really have any idea how, for example, Britannica writes their
maths articles. Do they actually employ mathematicians to write them? Do
they get a list of Topics in Maths and do some googling? It's probably true
that Britannica have a lower error/article ratio than Wikipedia but it
doesn't mean I should have blind faith in them. In fact, I expect that the
more esoteric the topic, the more likely it is to have errors in it as it's
more difficult to check. Another example could be biographies of long dead
people, how much effort do they put into looking through contemporary
research on the person and how much do they, in effect, just reprint out of
date versions from years ago?
Anyway, I'm beginning to ramble so I'll wrap this up. My point is that used
properly (the same as every other resource) I believe that Wikipedia is a
useful educational resource.
Cheers,
Andrew (Ams80)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Ehrenberg" <littledanehren(a)yahoo.com>
To: <wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org>
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2003 1:24 PM
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia for education
Like I said before: *in theory*, wikipedia is a great
educational source, but *in practice*, no one believes
it. Wikipedia does have its flaws that I believe could
be solved by this.
--LittleDan
--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
I believe it already is a "valid
educational
source".
Waiting for approval from educational bureaucrats,
and being restricted
by their political whims would destroy Wikipedia as
we know it. The
scrutiny would be not just on an article by article
basis, but on a
school district by school district basis. The range
of these from
permissive open-minded to Christian or Islamic
fundamentalist is so wide
that we would never have the resources to do all the
needed editing.
Wikipedia's primary value is not as a static source
in the way that a
printed book or CD wuld be. It is as a growing,
dynamic and editable
source. In the perpetual battle between the
irresistable force and the
immovable object we are on the side of the
irresistable force. Here in
British Columbia the provincial department of
education (at least in
theory) bases education on three principles of
learning. The one that
is relevant in this context is that education
requires the active
participation of the learner. The learner is not
there to just
passively vacuum up knowledge; he needs to
contribute to that knowledge
interactively. The old model based on respecting
the elders who
painstakingly amassed a precious body of knowledge
is not working as
well as it used to.
In the economic terms of supply and demand the
supply of knowledge has
been made higher than ever by electronic means. The
last time knowledge
got such a boost came with Gutenberg in the 15th
century. Taking an
example from a modern 18th century democracy like
the United States, we
have the Electoral College. It reflects a time when
Gutenberg's
revolution had taken hold, but before the
revolutions in transportation
of the 19th century. Communicating the results of
elections from
Georgia and New Hampshire was not a simple task. It
would have
stretched the imagination of the drafters of the
constitution to
conceive that some day a far larger and more
populous country would be
able to have all the results in one place before the
end of voting day.
(The Florida anomaly would have been no less
baffling to them as to the
modern person.)
Returning to education, the opportunity that we
offer is in dynamically
learning the skills of democratic participation.
Focusing on the
negative act of controling sexually explicit
material or the positive
act of promoting religious or patriotic values would
both have us
missing the opportunity. Part of the skill too is
learning to cope with
the disruptive elements in the society.
I could maintain this rant a lot longer! :-)
Eclecticology
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