Yostivanich

On Sun­day an arti­cle came out from The Argus dis­cussing a pro­fes­sor who had banned her stu­dents from using Wikipedia and Google. The accu­racy of Wikipedia is for a dif­fer­ent blog post. The key here is that Wikipedia and Google have been banned as even start­ing points. I find myself in par­tial agree­ment with this pro­fes­sor in the sense that I do see a very real prob­lem with peo­ple who click on the first one or two links on a Google search and assume the site is accurate.

The real issue here isn’t the accu­racy of web­sites is the lack of vet­ing occur­ring among stu­dents. Some web­sites do pro­vide good and accu­rate infor­ma­tion. I do read the major­ity of my news online from such places as BBC, does that make the news less accu­rate than the phys­i­cal ver­sion of it? Also, this blog is the per­fect exam­ple of a place where I openly admit that I am not an expert in many of the sub­jects that I dis­cuss but I hope to pro­vide accu­rate infor­ma­tion and some decent analy­sis of news that I come across. Should you not trust my site. I would obvi­ously say you should trust my site, but not because it is my site. For what then do you no longer go to your friends for advice on a sub­ject. Do you have a friend where even though they may not be an expert in a par­tic­u­lar field you still ask their opin­ion about some­thing? Most of you prob­a­bly do have at least one if not more friends like that, peo­ple whose opin­ion you do trust. This blog is much like a friend, you take infor­ma­tion from it and you have to decide if the infor­ma­tion is both trust­wor­thy and use­ful. You may go to an expert to ver­ify the infor­ma­tion but the friend is your flash­light to help you find out what ques­tions to ask or where to start look­ing for more accu­rate infor­ma­tion or some very sur­face level questions.

That is what Wikipedia and Google pro­vide, they pro­vide the abil­ity to exam­ine very broad sub­jects and nar­row the focus. At the same time, Google and Wikipedia pro­vide access to infor­ma­tion on what can be called very spefic and lim­ited fields of study. I once helped a friend write direc­tions for what a nor­mal Indian girl would need to know going on a date here in Amer­ica. It wasn’t easy find­ing infor­ma­tion in a book or ency­clo­pe­dia about that sort of thing. But at the same time some­one some­where must have writ­ten on it, there surely had to be a the­sis on dat­ing cus­toms of Indi­ans some­where. So what did I do, I went to Google and looked for infor­ma­tion about that sub­ject. It was the sort of thing that you wouldn’t typ­i­cally be able to find just search­ing through a card cat­a­log, book descrip­tions can be very vague at times. How­ever if I found a blog post about a book or arti­cle on it, I’ve gained access to a source I would never have known about pre-Internet. I also looked at Wikipedia, look­ing for where Wikipedia was cit­ing their infor­ma­tion on Indian cul­ture. Again I gained access to new sources and at the same time got a rough and quick overview of Indian dat­ing cul­ture. No, it wasn’t com­plete, but did it mat­ter? Not really, I wasn’t look­ing for the entire paper, I was look­ing to com­pile the paper from mul­ti­ple sources and look­ing at places that could pro­vide ref­er­ences as to pos­si­ble sources of information.

I don’t feel that Wikipedia and Google are per­fect sources of infor­ma­tion, while at the same time I don’t feel that Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­nica is a per­fect source either. Both can pro­vide access to infor­ma­tion. What stu­dents should be able to do is to use any source pos­si­ble, but have to ver­ify that the source is accu­rate. The stu­dents should have to write a para­graph as to why this source is a trusted source, even for Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­nica. I would chal­lenge peo­ple who cri­tique the use of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy in the class­room take a look at this video and see how dif­fer­ent a class­room of stu­dents play and are taught. Edu­ca­tion still hasn’t caught up the dig­i­tal and infor­ma­tion rev­o­lu­tion occur­ring in the world and edu­ca­tion more than any field should embrace it.