I agree with much of what Kajder says in Chapter 5. The internet became mainstream when I was in college, so my high school experience was certainly lacking in technology. As a teacher, I assume my students are much more internet savy than I am. However, Kajder brings up the fact that the web is massive, and although students use it in their daily lives, they don't necessarily have the proper tools. I know that when I assign a research project, the kids automatically head for Google or Wikipedia (a site I have banned from my classroom). It is wrong to assume that students know how to effectively access information on the web. I like the fact that Kajder gives her students an Internet Quiz. Up to this point I have not done that, but I think this is something I will begin to implement. I also like the class activity she conducts where the class decides upon a keyword, searches, and compares their findings.
As Kajder says, "As English teachers, we never expect students to select a book and work their minds through it without first preparing them with strategies, expectations, and tools for inpacking what they might find
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Hi Leigh,
I too really like some of Kajder's strategies (and I'll probably post about that separately). Regarding your post, I am so glad you mentioned that you banned wikipedia from your classroom. I have been eager to get the scoop on this from an Eng. teacher's perspective. The entire English dept. at Randolph High also banned students from using Wikipedia for any research. My students would always come into my class and tell me that with a pout. Why is it that English teachers feel so strongly about this? My own introduction to Wikipedia came from our Resource Specialist at the advising center where I used to work. He held an MLA, so he obviously knew a lot about how databases and information banks got put together, and he was very much in favor of wikipedia and thought that it had a very effective system for becoming increasingly accurate. So, when I found out high school English teachers were so adamantly against students using it for research, I was surprised. I must confess that I am not a wikipedia user myself, so I don't really know it. Also, I can understand that teachers wouldn't want students to use ONLY this source for information. But, what is wrong with it as a starting point to find out what key concepts they might then need to research elsewhere? You all (English teachers) seem to be in agreement, so I'm dying to get the dish. (I didn't dare ask the teachers at RHS because I thought they might look down on me for not knowing.)
Middlebury's history department banned the citation of Wikipedia this year. They made an important distinction -- students may use Wikipedia, but may not cite it in papers or exams.
This is a brief quote from a NY Times article published on February 21 of this year:
"Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, 'I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all.'
He continued: 'Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.'
I agree with what Jimmy Wales says here: the issue is less about Wikipedia's accuracy (according to many reports, the site is very accurate); the issue is about finding, reading, and citing rich, substantive informational resources. The type of information on Wikipedia -- is by admission of its own founder -- not necessarily information with tremendous depth.
Many educators are understandably skeptical of Wikipedia. However, I think we should be more open-minded. It might provide a student with no direction a starting point.
Leigh, just so you know, my initial reaction to the existence of Wikipedia was identical to how you currently feel. I've had ongoing discussions with colleagues, friends, and students about this topic, and my mind has changed (reluctantly).
Ana and Lucien, you have an interesting tension going about Leigh's post.I too am a bit familiar with this issue, having assigned a few "Research Papers" in Comp class. I think at the heart of this is the question of information versus interpretation. Clearly you want students to process and take their interest to a personal and unique level of interpretation. So, if Wikipedia is cited then there may be an inference that there is an agreement with the author, or that the author is speaking for the student. So I like Lucien's school policy; this way there is no confusion over how the student may use this reference. The danger is students taking an interpretation from Wikipedia and using it as their own. I would want to create an assignment where there is some sort of scaffolding in place that that distinction between information and interpretation is very clear and there is room to see a developing argument or thesis that is entirely the student's. I don't think the issue at hand is especially about reference works as it is about English class and the kind of assignment sequencing that is taking place. In my view Kajder reveals a conventional outlook toward English studies.
GT
Gerard again you make good points. The difference between information and interpretation is the question at the heart of the Wikipedia debate. Both Lucien and Ana use the words “starting point” and I’m convinced the site has merits as a launching pad for the exploration of any topic, but no more than that.
I’m also curious Gerard as to why you would see Kajder’s pedagogy as conventional. Were their particular aspects that you didn’t like, or thought were unoriginal? What would you have done differently?
The Middlebury High school decision on the use of Wikipedia is probably the right way to go in the long term. At least this way it keeps the door open on an entry point for kids to any subject that their researching. I think it would be unnecessary and maybe a bit too harsh to completely ban Wikipedia, but I suppose if it becomes just too burdensome to monitor it might have to get banned.
I think for all the bad things people say about Wikipedia it fosters a desire to learn, and learn more in kids that may not be the most academically motivated. It gives these kids the training wheels to move from first base to more serious and respected forms of inquiry. That alone is a good thing.
Jason, I have formed this impression from several comments and editorial choices that have been made in this book. Each one may not be enough to make a fair assumption, but as a group, I have a general sense that she is approaching technology, especially the web, from a traditionalist viewpoint of composition. For example, on p.83, Figure 7.3, You can see her task outline and see the 7 point outline she has created. This looks similar to the five paragraph essay that is typical of traditionalist composition class methods. In the same area , I was trying to follow the webquest project and found there to be a large disconnect between her 11th grades class work on “Getting the Word Out” and the intended audience- third grade students. I was puzzled how this project was represented if the users of the website were in elementary school. I also found few references to her teaching philosophy. On pg. 77, she mentions the advantages of webquests as good for “constructivist English classroom in that they are inquiry-orientated and centered on a doable [sic] differentiated engaging task”. I do not see how this phrase articulates in articulate way a constructivist approach to language. In the same para she then describes the webquest as a research device, and an “engaging learning activity”. The concern is that she has a teaching philosophy that not come across well in her language or her book design. In terms of her chapter on information literacy, I hesitate that I would include this area in my classroom, rather than assign a required library module supervised by librarians who have a disciplinary focus on information storage and retrieval. To use English class time to work on information retrieval conveys the message that English studies have an interest in some way in the organization or display of knowledge. A true constructivist approach uses language with all its possible meanings and implied inferences to create a rich learning environment of language for different tasks and contexts. Using the web as a source of information limits a students ability to work with a new medium that crosses linguistic, social, and national boundaries, and diminishes the potential for English class to engages students in a study of language that is full of possibilities and new directions.
This comment is belated, but in case anyone is rereading our posts -- I apologize for not being clear, but the Middlebury mentioned in one of my comments is the college in Vermont... there was a news story out in February of this year.
I agree with Gerard that Kajder is working within a pretty conventional framing of the work of the English classroom, focusing on what technology can add to the work that most teachers would be doing/expected to do--and that makes her book valuable as a source of ideas that can connect to some aspect of most people's teaching practices. At the same time, I thinks it's very important that our teaching be guided by coherent philosophical underpinnings--that we really know why we're doing the things we choose to do in terms of our understanding of literacy and learning. Ann Berthoff used to be driven crazy by the decontextualized "classroom idea exchange" that's long been a feature of NCTE meetings--the notion that teaching activities could just be plunked down into different classrooms with no sense that they might need to be situated within a larger framework or philosophy and some carefully sequenced work. Kajder offers somewhat more context than that,but that does remain a danger for us to take into account as we try to apply her ideas.
About Wikipedia: It's a rich an interesting experiment with the "shared knowledge" of a vast internet community, and I'm often impressed with the quality of its entries. I think it would be interesting to have students create their own wiki entries on something they've researched (perhaps in small groups), and then compare them to what's on
Wikipedia. Perhaps there's something they'd want to add, to disagree with, etc. There's a lot of room here for working toward some rich understandings of what we consider to be authoritative knowledge, how it gets made, and why such a project has had the impact that Wikipedia has. I don't mind having students cite Wikipedia, but I might ask them why they think that what they've cited is reliable. And I do want them to be doing more than gathering information.
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