[Air-l] Wikipedia warning -- Wikipedia is not a reliable information source

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

What strikes me in this discussion is that... it ignores an  
opportunity to encourage students to learn what a good source is and  
what isn't.   Given rules doesn't work, because when they rules  
disappear, many students return to the forbidden behaviors.   Instead  
of making rules, I encourage students to use appropriate sources and  
I grade them in that regard along with every other aspect of their  
work.   That way they learn, over the period a course of learning to  
discern good sources from bad sources.   Wikipedia is neither a good,  
nor a bad source, but for my courses, it and other encyclopedias are  
fairly inadequate because the 'facts of the matter' that  
encyclopedias provide are not really what I want students to focus  
on, I want them to focus on arguments, problems, and issues, and  
those are usually best exemplified in scholarly literatures, and not  
oft found in any detail in encyclopedias.   anyway, this is my  
opinion:  arguments about wikipedia are moot in the face of arguments  
in favor teaching students to discern the relevancy of any given  
material for any given project.
On Dec 4, 2005, at 4:50 PM, Ken Friedman wrote:



jeremy hunsinger
jhuns at vt.edu
www.cddc.vt.edu
jeremy.tmttlt.com
www.tmttlt.com

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