This is a useful discussion. The point about information literacy is really very important. There's plenty of evidence to show that information literacy / critical thinking is not taught to a high enough standard. This is an incredibly important skill in the digital age. There is so much information out there that it can be overwhelming for people without those skills and very difficult to determine what can be trusted, what has credibility and what constitutes a reliable source. I recommend an excellent paper on the topic by Demos called "Truth, Lies and the Internet" which can be downloaded for free.

Wikimedia UK has taken some tentative steps towards a collaboration on this topic with Demos and a group called Digital Disruption. It's very much a side project at the moment but the first need is for research to demonstrate a need for these skills to be taught more widely and more effectively. To this end, Demos are looking for funding for the research. Where WMUK will come in to this eventually is on helping to provide tools (perhaps based on Wikimedia projects) to teach young people (in particular) the skills which we are defining as digital fluency.

There's not a great deal to report at the moment but you can find some very basic information on this on the WMUK wiki - although it is not a core project by any means and is very much exploratory at this stage.

Thanks,

Stevie

On 14 May 2013 13:00, Tom Morris <tom@tommorris.org> wrote:

On Tuesday, 14 May 2013 at 12:08, geni wrote:

> On 13 May 2013 14:39, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com (mailto:charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com)> wrote:
> > The point about not citing encyclopedias is really old hat. Once you're in tertiary education you shouldn't cite tertiary sources?
>
> May not be addressed depending on the field. Back when I was doing my degree they just insisted that you cite journals so the issue of primary secondary and tertiary (and to be fair significant chunks of wikipedia are secondary rather than tertiary) didn't arise.

Part of the problem is that information literacy is really poorly taught IMHO.

It's often shuffled around universities: between academic staff, librarians and learning support people, and nobody actually takes the time to tell students what is and isn't acceptable. (And then those students start editing Wikipedia…)

I saw a first year student a while back who was citing a "crystal healing" website to define key terms in moral philosophy for the essay they had to do on computer ethics as part of a computer science degree at a top 10 UK department for computing. Nobody had actually taught them at school or upon getting to university that some sources were better than others, and that you might actually have to go to the library and open a book rather than just go to Google and find a source that says what you want it to say.

I know that when I got to university, they offered those kinds of skills as optional "study skills" modules, which lots of people just didn't bother going to - because they naturally assumed from having passed their A-levels with grades good enough to let them go to university that they didn't need to learn any new study skills. Making basic information literacy and study skills non-optional both at school and university would be good.

It's not Wikipedia's job to make society actually teach information literacy (although Wikimedians and WMUK might want to publicly advocate it). That's the job of schools and universities. It'd be nice to know in a non-anecdotal way whether they are actually trying to do this and how well they are doing.

--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>

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