Posted May. 9/09
A report on the readiness of high school students for university recently attracted a lot of attention. It was released by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, or OCUFA. The results of the study, drawn from a tiny sample of OCUFA's membership, were not encouraging. It concluded that students are immature and use online sources to carry out their research. In the week after the report's release stories appeared in the Canadian press stating that Ontario's education system was producing generations of "Wikipedia Kids," the ultimate insult. But imagine, though, that this were a compliment. Students these days are technologically savvy. They have easy access to the Internet and they have a pretty good idea about how to use it. Even though the technology is new, our duty remains the same: To teach students how to use the means of information available to them to engage in scholarly inquiry. This used to apply to books; it should also apply to blogs, to YouTube, and to Wikipedia.
The OCUFA study uses a very different logic. It assumes a tone of moral panic. In fact, it's actually two moral panics, one about the future of our young people, the other about the manipulative use of media technologies for nefarious purposes.
These arguments provide immediate gratification for those who make them because they produce easy associations even though things are more complex. They act as an analgesic, something that can soothe us when we feel vulnerable or confused. In my field of communication studies these kinds of arguments come a dime a dozen. Video games, movies, music videos, and television regularly appear as the culprits for various kinds of deviant social behaviour. Moral panics also convey a fall from grace; both new technologies and young people symbolize promise and potential, technologies manipulate young people because they are "immature," and adults feel threatened by new technologies because they challenge established ways of living.
In place of moral panics we need an appreciation of how Wikipedia works, who uses it, and why. Each entry into Wikipedia is open for editing, adjustment, debates, and so on. Much has been made of the errors and inconsistencies; however, many Wikipedia entries are comprehensive and useful. But most faculty members know all about this because they, like me, use it all the time to look things up. None of us will write papers using it, but Wikipedia does serve some function to us, as an entry point into something else or as a quick reference. Admitting that we use Wikipedia is the first step towards teaching our students how best to use it for educational purposes, and I know many faculty members here who have already done so.
If the idea of using Wikipedia to cheat is unsettling, should it be? Does anyone remember Coles Notes, or cheating the old fashioned way by copying passages from books or buying essays? From the convenience of the Internet, these old ways of cheating carry an almost retro feel. The emergence of a new player serves as a challenge to what universities do, but it does not change the rules of the game. It is still incumbent upon us to provide the training to students about how to distinguish between "stuff" and evidence and how to put evidence in the service of arguments, whether Wikipedia is involved or not.
Clearly, OCUFA has a serious message to get across about the way the education system in Ontario is supported by the provincial government. However, in the name of media attention OCUFA painted a picture that suggests very little about the benefits and detriments of learning in a world of information abundance. By hitching its argument to moral panic, both the report and the media coverage fail to recognize how Wikipedia — and the Internet as a whole — raises all kinds of philosophical questions which universities are well-equipped to address. Questions such as "What is an author?", "Who has the authority or expertise to speak?", "How is trust established?" or "What counts as evidence?" are being asked, to varying degrees, across the social, behavioural, and physical sciences as well as the humanities.
Producing a generation of "Wikipedia kids" educated with the skills to research in the information age and a sensitivity to these kinds of longstanding questions would be a major accomplishment for universities, even if it makes few headlines.
Ira Wagman is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Journalism and Communication
