Wikipedia, the cockroach of the education establishment
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In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker observes:
- The new always looks so small, so puny, so unpromising next to the size and performance of maturity.
Clayton Christensen notes this is why market leaders so often miss discontinious innovations. If you were sitting in the Sears Tower in Chicago in the late 1960s with nothing but growth opportunities as far on the horizon as you could see, how important could anything in Bentonville, Arkansas be?
Actually, in my experience, market leaders often see emerging, disruptive organizations, and are downright hostile to them because they seem so disorienting. When I was at KEMET, emerging, Taiwan-based electronics companies were radically restructuring the world KEMET had dominated, and the KEMET marketing people could frequently be heard dismissing "those cockroaches in Asia." KEMET was at least a decade late in getting to Asia, and they now are in a ditch that has proven extremely difficult to climb out of.
The same thing happens today with educators and Wikipedia, which has now had published the 10 millionth article. Note it is "Wikipedia had published," not "Wikipedia published," because thousands of people from around the world have contributed to Wikipedia in a free wheeling and open fashion. Obviously, there are a whole lot of people in the world that get this fascinating, new open source model of compiling knowledge.
So do we see the market leaders in knowledge today, from university professors to K-12 teachers, embracing this new, discontinuous model? Of course not. In fact, in many cases they ban their students from using Wikipedia.
I first ran into this when my son's high school teacher refused to allow his classmates to use Wikipedia. This is crazy. Kids in his class will live in a world where this type of open, global collaboration will dramatically impact their careers. I contacted my son's teacher, shared my concerns, and even offered to help lead an exploration of what Wikipedia is and its pros and cons. After exhausting the argument that Wikipedia should be dismissed as unreliable, his teacher ended the debate by noting that this isn't in the standards that his class' high stakes testing will be based on.
That gets to a whole other dysfunction in the way we deliver K-12 education. We don't teach students to think critically. We teach them to regurgitate facts, many of which will be obsolete shortly after the high stakes tests are completed.
Rather than focus on what Wikipedia is and teach their students the pros and cons of an emerging, open source knowledge model, educators see Wikipedia as the the threat that it is to the way their world is organized, and they dismiss it as the cockroach in their environment. The veracity of their opposition is one of the surest signs that educators intuitively understand that Wikipedia is a powerful, if disorienting, new model that is rocking their world. Many education advocates argue that education is somehow immune from the normal market forces that the rest of us live with daily. This is one more example of how that is not the case.
This should provide all of us the sober reality that we dismiss the discontinious cockroaches in our world at our own peril.
| Organizations | Wikipedia |
|---|---|
| Source | Swamp Fox |
| Submitter | John Warner |
| Tags | Innovation |
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One of the things that makes America great is that we have checks and balances at many levels. This protects us, as citizens, from large fluctuations in policy and practice.
Growing up in Canada, I recall wild swings when the political party of choice changed (often every four years at that time in history).
Checks and balances were built into our American education system. Now however, this system has become a social mechanism of its own, often shut off from the realities of the world around it ... with the corresponding blockades to new input and innovation. People in the educational system actually seem to work hard to install protective systems so their world views and operating methods cannot be challenged.
Basically, it has become a single choice system - their way or no way!
Many of the front line teachers long for the day when they can just be teachers again instead of paper pushers, but they are blocked by the educational "Kremlin" that decides what is right and good.
New technologies like Wikipedia will be embraced by the educational system only when the innovation is either forced upon them by law or by competetion. The mood of the country is only slowly warming up to the idea of educational competition. Law makers would probably not even know where to start on this issue. So don't hold your breath for quality and innovative education any time soon. Become a great parent and assume that mantle yourself.
The reality is that current students, like every generation before it, will find a way to use the resources available to them, and in the process, the unrealistic "rules" will become irrelevant. Closed minded teachers and administrators will also gradually become frustrated and irrelevant ... and hopefully "retired."
Tony is right, the error rate on Wiki is quite low, though for some topics it can be higher than conventional peer review articles. Most standard references regurgitate old myths as well as more solid information, so the wiki world is far from the inexact space the acedemic community wants us to think it is. There is a place for a peer review reference, but for rapid access to general information, Wikipedia is my first choice.
The biggest problem with using Wiki is that students tend to use it as the main or only reference source while researching a topic. Wiki is outstanding for matters relating to pop culture but must prove its worth over time in the more established fields. “Peer review” and editorial control are the gold standards for academics and reference texts; authors and editors must have sufficient knowledge and/or credentials to ensure expertise. Otherwise the Stephen Colberts of the world can alter “reality” with just a few key strokes. The beauty of Wiki is its timeliness; new and current information appears within hours or days instead of taking years for revised editions in print publications.
Also, as educators slowly move towards more "open source" on-line publishing venues and away from expensive hardback textbooks (forfeiting royalty revenue while saving students money), those contributing and/or using Wikibooks will be much more receptive for using Wiki as a reliable reference source. The basic hurtle is having academic peers and administrators recognize Wiki or other on-line or internet-based articles and/or books as “publications” for consideration in tenure and promotion.
Bill Hemphill
Associate Professor, Engr. Tech.
East Tennessee State Univ.
109C Wilson-Wallis Hall
Johnson City, TN 37604
hemphill@etsu.edu
I recently participated in a discussion panel on Wikipedia at a SC university. An anti-Wikipedia panelist displayed a Wikipedia article with several disclaimers and multiple edits (because the topic of the article is a concept that is still forming). The panelist pointed to it and said "look at this mess, how can this be considered authoritative?" When my turn came, I displayed the very same page and said "look at this, at no other time in human history have we had a resource allowing near real-time discussion and debate involving people from all over the world on a topic that will one day be etched in stone in some dead enclycopedia!"
I couldn't agree more. Wikipedia is a collaborative knowledge base. Collaboration yields better answers, broader perspective, and is generally self-policing in terms of fact checking. I use it and quote it regularly. For example: http://www.chiefexecutiveblog.com/2008/01/newton-was-right-effecting-cha...
I couldn't agree more. I was shocked when a media specialist from a leading SC university recently told me that Wikipedia was "worthless" and that students at her university were strongly discouraged from using it.
This is patent nonsense. I use Wikipedia on a regular basis in my job (translating documents relating to various cutting edge technologies) because Wikipedia is one of the few places I can find detailed articles on these innovative technologies written by leading experts in these fields. When dealing with critical issues, I do of course check other sources to verify Wikipedia's information. But I've consulted thousands of articles on Wikipedia, and still I can count on one hand the number of times I've found major problems involving content (as opposed to style).
I only wish more educators would wake up to this vital resource.
It's interesting to note that some studies show the error rate in Wikipedia to be lower that that of traditional encyclopedias. When an error is found, it's typically corrected within minutes or hours. The print encyclopedia takes months to release a correction.
- Tony McCune