Dean’s Book Course Instructor Forum

On April 10, Robert Sapolsky spoke at Middlebury College. He talked about — you guessed it — stress! Check out the web page: http://media.www.middleburycampus.com/media/storage/paper446/news/2008/04/17/Features/Sapolsky.Stresses.Cautionary.Tales-3329993.shtml

All the best,

Kim

Be sure to read the last comment!

Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2008

U. of Texas Professor Praises Wikipedia

Scholars often take swipes at Wikipedia, claiming that it dumbs down education and encourages intellectual laziness. Some professors have even banned their students from using it for research. But in an article this week in Science Progress, a scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas argues that such bans are irresponsible.

David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the university, writes that students need to become familiar with new and non-static forms of communication. He encourages his students to read Wikipedia’s “history” and “discussion” pages, saying they explain how articles were produced. And he says the online encyclopedia’s entry on global warming does a good job of explaining both the controversy and the science surrounding the issue.

“Like it or not, the networked digital archive changes our basis of knowledge,” Mr. Parry writes “and training people for the future is about training them for this shift.”—Andrea L. Foster

Posted on Thursday February 14, 2008 | Permalink |

Comments

1. Anyone who wants to get a sense of just what brand of fruitcakes one is dealing with in Wikipedia World should try reading the English Wikipedia Discussion List for a month or two.Just don’t go in there without a spotter to haul you back out while you still have some shred of your faculties intact.— Jon Awbrey Feb 14, 04:17 PM #
2. Sure, Wikipedia can and should be “used for research”, in the same way a classroom might use a cadaver for research. The class shouldn’t take the cadaver home to meet Mother, nor should it use the cadaver to co-sign for a loan.Wikipedia has immense research value — as the SUBJECT of the research, not the citation FOR the research.— Gregory Kohs Feb 14, 04:43 PM #
3. Wikipedia is just as good as most basic encyclopedias, and it doesn’t need “academic” (cough, cough cough) consent, nor payments to “academic” writers.Join the emergent information transfer paradigm you 20th century types!;-)— Max Macias Feb 14, 04:52 PM #
4. We all understand the desire for quick online reliable access.
   Wikipedia will thrive as long as online access to ‘peer reviewed’ and ‘academically reliable information’ remains expensive – Why don’t we spend our energy having a conversation about obtaining convenient access free of advertisement to Britannica, Americana, Funk & Wagnall or Gale Encyclopedia of Science, etc.? — M. Hansen Feb 14, 05:06 PM #
5. I think the most important point David Parry makes in his article is that, thanks to the history and discussion pages, the review process for producing articles is much more transparent than it is for traditional encyclopedias. Instructors can direct students to these pages and engage the students in useful discussions about how knowledge is produced. Furthermore, the barrier for students to actually participate in the production of knowledge is much lower with Wikipedia.The accuracy of individual entries in Wikipedia is important, sure, but it’s somewhat beside the point. Wikipedia makes visible the process by which knowledge is produced. That features opens the doors to all kinds of educational possibilities.— Derek Feb 14, 06:00 PM #
6. I agree with Derek.Like any encyclopedia, Wiklpedia is a tertiary reference that should be used with care.Transparent editing logs and discussion forums can help students gain an understanding of the writing and research processes. More research publications will adopt these tools over time, as their readers and contributors demand the functionality.I tell my students not to cite Wikipedia directly. However, there are many good Wikipedia articles that have reference lists. Those lists may be a good way to find secondary sources.— Bill Sodeman Feb 14, 06:21 PM #
7. Derek:
   I don’t know about you, but I actually spent some time working in that sausage factory you know as “Wikipedia”. It is the “wurst” thing imaginable, as far as encyclopedias go. Knowing all too well “the process”, I can assure you it bears far more resemblance to a MMORPG than any reputable encyclopedia. — Cedric Feb 14, 06:22 PM #
8. Ah, Yes, Transparency …Try to imagine a typical day at the Wikipedian Campus o’ th’ Future.1001 Administrators, all of them dressed in the Full Regalia of Halloween, with pseudonyms straight out of Harry Potter and other Great Books.Chancellor Waldemart says she has a cold today, but you could swear it’s the same person who called himself Provost Lestringent yesterday. But never mind that now — how well you remember the fate of Poor Old Bumblebore, summarily banned from Campus for all time by Chief Counsel Snipe, and all he did was hint that Dean Umbrage talked and walked in a manner quite reminiscent of Dean Malvolio.Yes, no doubt that’s the sort of “Transparency” that Administrations o’ th’ Future would be glad to don — along with their Precious Invisibility Cloaks.— Jon Awbrey Feb 14, 10:26 PM #
9. Wikipedia is useful for elements of pop-culture that are rarely covered academically. It’s also useful in that it contains links to respectable sources. And when it comes to math or even science it’s not awful.Where it’s mostly horrid/harmful is on anything concerning humans. (Religion, politics, biographies of people, etc) On that it’s so terrible I’d be willing to say it’d be better if it didn’t exist. However if you just want to know about animated television series or math theorems it’s fine.Note: I’ve edited at Wikipedia for about three years under the name “T. Anthony.”— Thomas R Feb 14, 11:12 PM #
10. Jimmy Wales, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia made a salient observation in a TIME magazine interview (April 2, 2007, p. 6). In response to a reader question, “How can I persuade my teachers to allow me to use Wikipedia as a legitimate research source?” Wales said, “I would agree with your teachers that that isn’t the right way to use Wikipedia. It’s a wonderful starting point for research. But it’s only a starting point because there’s always a chance that something’s wrong, and you should check your sources if you are writing a paper.” NOW he tells us! — MDR Feb 15, 07:15 AM #

If you are interested in issue of literacy, particularly in Africa where Lessing spent many years (and has recent connections to Zimbabway, you may want to read the speech she gave last December, titled “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.” Here is the link http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2007/lessing-lecture_en.html

If you taught DBC last spring, with the Persepolis books, you may be interested to hear that Marjane Satrapi will speak at Smith College this spring: Thursday, April 3 at 7pm, John M. Greene Hall.

Also, Satrapi’s black-and-white animated film Persepolis, based on her two graphic novels, will be screened at the Pleasant St. Theater and Amherst Cinema soon.

Enjoy,
Kim Wolfson

The Peters Projection Map, which displays countries and continents at their true size and proportion, was mentioned in the Thursday retreat. It is kind of astonishing how big Africa looks. You can get these at Hastings or at www.odt.org, or learn more at www.diversophy.com/petersmap.htm

For me, some of the most moving parts of Memoir of a Primate had to with the author’s past and his work that began with a childhood dream. He mentioned having an Adrienne Rich poem about Dian Fossey taped to his dorm wall, or something like that, and, I felt I had to find that poem.(sorry, Alex, I used the old fashioned research method of plunking myself in front of a stack in Jones Library and combing through books, which was pretty fun) It’s called “The Observer” and gives a very different, much more romantic picture of Fossey, who is not mentioned by name, but not many others studying mountain gorillas then. If you’d like to see a copy, email me at jeanatkins@aol.com and I’ll send it to you as an attachment.

Check out this article in the Oct. 29 Time magazine. It talks about a campus-style rehab center for ex bin Ladenites. I’d enjoy hearing what you and your students think of this. Here’s the web address: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1673270,00.html.

Kim

Only 466 Iraqi refugees have been admitted into our country since 2003, while about two million are living in Syria, Jordan, and other countries. If you have time for a discussion or debate on this controversy, here are two articles you can draw from:

Swarns, Rachel. “Against Odds, Iraqi Refugees Reach U.S.” New York
Times 11 March 2007. 21
Oct. 2007 .
Lam, Andrew. “Iraqi Refugees Find No Haven in US.” The Nation 23
January 2007. 21 Oct. 2007 .

Kim

I found some great materials to use in a class discussion about stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims. Jack Shaheen’s book, REEL BAD ARABS: HOW HOLLYWOOD VILIFIES A PEOPLE is available online through UMass Libraries. You can borrow the accompanying film (same name), which Shaheen narrates, from Jones Library and probably from the 5 Colleges libraries, too. Kim

Here’s a terrific 1992 Atlantic article by Benjamin Barber, recommended by David Mednicoff at today’s tea.

Barber argues that humanity has fallen into one of two irreconcilable identities, which “operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. They have one thing in common: neither offers much hope to citizens looking for practical ways to govern themselves democratically.”

Thankfully, Barber doesn’t leave us in a hopeless dialectic, but leaves open the possibility of a third way. “Democracy grows from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be built from the inside out,” he says as he imagines hope — albeit farfetched — in a vision of confederalism as proclaimed in our Articles of Confederation…”a confederal union of semi-autonomous communities smaller than nation-states, tied together into regional economic associations and markets larger than nation-states—participatory and self-determining in local matters at the bottom, representative and accountable at the top.”