2009/3/26 Gordon Joly gordon.joly@pobox.com:
At 16:17 +0000 25/3/09, Thomas Dalton wrote:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7962912.stm
"The Guardian said the draft review requires primary school children to be familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication."
It looks like there may be a little more demand for my proposal for WMUK to go into schools...
As I recall, "projects in schools" was always part of Wikimedia UK (1.0 and 2.0) thinking....
The announcement is rather odd. Bit like saying "children should watch more television" in the 1950s and 1960s. Twitter, WIkimedia, Bebo, Facebook, MySpace are (social) media: is the suggestion that they start media studies in school from the first day? Or is the suggestion that 5 year olds become Wikipedia editors?
Wikipedia isn't social, it's academic. Learning how to use various academic media seems like a good thing to do in school. (We're talking about reading Wikipedia rather than contributing to it, I think - although if we do go into schools I'd like to talk briefly about editing too.)