Wikipedia: a teaching resource

I am enhancing a workshop that I share with teachers on the classroom use of Wikipedia. Now, you may be surprised at this, but I still encounter teachers who don’t even know what Wikipedia is!! That is shocking, but I value these teachers because anyone who takes the time to attend a workshop on a topic they know nothing about clearly is a learner! I will also note that more and more, when I ask who allows Wikipedia to be used by students for early stage research, more and more teachers are raising their hands.

Anyway, the point is, I found a blog entitled Traffic Statistics for Wikipedia Articles that links to a site, Wikipedia Traffic Statistics, showing the top 500 Wikipedia articles and the number of visits to each of those site by year. From that site, you can visit the actual site…then I suggest you go to the discussion tab and click on that tab to see how reputable the site itself is. Of course, you will see sites that a teacher would never take a student to…however, there are some excellent sites on the list…like Speed of Light which is rated as a “featured” article in Wikipedia which means it has been “peer reviewed” by an editorial board and found to be reputable and even valuable to the field of physics in the accuracy and importance of the information offered.

There is much to learn about Wikipedia and there are many ways that all content areas could be using it to engage their students and increase learning!!! I have been giving a two-hour workshop on using Wikipedia to teach the skills of Critical Literacy. There is so much there, that my workshop will be expanding to a full day to incorporate reading comprehension, Critical Literacy and writing….mulitple literacies using emerging technology!!! I almost put this baby to bed before further investigation. If you are interested in Wikipedia, check this blog out, right here on WordPress: The Way Things Work. And then go to Larry Sanger’s (founder of Wikipedia) new online encyclopedia, Citizendium. The plot thickens and my curiousity is peaked!!