"Wik-it" is becoming as popular as "Google-it."

...at least that's the word on the street...the street in the virtual world that is. And, the buzz around sources for Oral Comm. right here at UNI.

We had a discussion about this in our TA meeting for Oral Communication--and the consensus was that absolutley no Wikipedia. I have said it over and over, yet what do many of my students use--Wiki! It has become so engrained in their "routine" of research that they practically can't look anything up without using it.

I would like to pose the argument that the responsibility of discernment falls with the viewer of the information. In my class discussions of late, we have been dialoguing about the critical lens we need to use with the media. And, I propose that we do the same with Wiki. With our news once we check a few places and they are all in agreement, we tend to believe something as truth. Thus, I see Wiki as a good starting point in the same way. Wiki is a place to get a new thought or idea in your head and then go search it out...to see if other sources match up--what a good researcher would do anyway!

Andrew Keen on the Britannica.com site says,"As Gorman explains, the intellectual life of our society is at stake. This is a critically serious debate that will determine the credibility and the very viability of our information economy. If we want our kids to be ignorant, then accept the fashionable inanities of Web 2.0. If not, join the cause. And fight against the flattening of our culture into a wasteland of collectivist nonsense."

I wholeheartedly agree with him and that is why we need to focus on the discernment and critical lens. At Coe, I took a media course and we discussed the need of an actual course teaching young people to do this. Sad or not they don't know how to "critically un-mask" what the news media and Web 2.0 sites are feeding them. They live on these sites. They probably interact more with them than their teachers or parents, yet I bet most parents would see a course of that nature as being a waste of time. But what's going to be a waste is the brain rot and ignorance that is going to emerge if the young people become the future leaders and have grown up accepting these outlets as truth. But, hey, we're all about CHANGE right now so maybe one can hope:)

The last paragraph of this article sums it up well...let's be critical thinkers people!

The Wikipedia problem
KEN HUNT
Oct. 16, 2007 10:11 AM EDT
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales last year told a Pennsylvania audience he gets about 10 e-mails a week from students who end up in trouble because they cited the online encyclopedia in a paper and the information turned out to be wrong. He doesn't have much sympathy for their plight, though. "For God sake," he said, "you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia."

There is no doubting the influence of Mr. Wales's online collaborative encyclopedia. It now ranks in the top 10 websites on the Internet in terms of traffic and just about any Google search will turn up a Wikipedia article as one of the first few hits.

Started in 2001, the online encyclopedia now logs more than two million articles, with approximately 60,000 new articles being added each month.

Some of the articles are excellent. Others are very poor. The difficult part, many say, is telling the difference. The beauty of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it. The problem is that anyone does. Yet, despite the warnings that come from Mr. Wales and a number of others about citing Wikipedia as a source, many professors find students relying on the site more and more. Dr. Daniel O'Donnell, an associate professor and chair of the Department of English at the University of Lethbridge, says that it is rare these days to see an undergraduate paper that doesn't rely on Wikipedia.

This is not surprising. After all, throughout the culture, Wikipedia has become as common a source to cite as any traditional media source.

"I've used Wikipedia a ton of times," says Walter Zimmerman, electronic services librarian at the University of Western Ontario. "You just have to realize what it is and how it works." Mr. Zimmerman has been helping students with research for more than 30 years, but these days he finds that one of the basic roles he performs is to teach students some basic information literacy. "You should consider Wikipedia as a survey of the collective wisdom on a topic," he says.
"Wikipedia can be a great starting point," Mr. Zimmerman points out, "because it covers topics that don't traditionally get room in an encyclopedia.

"The most important thing to consider, though, is the potential bias in a Wikipedia article and where it might come from. That's something that we teach students: to consider the biases inherent in any source, not just Wikipedia. All media need to be viewed through a critical lens."