Wikipedia The Speedia
Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for speed.
When I was searching for the wiki entry's I was amazed to find that there are so many different Wiki applications. There is Wikinews, Wikiquotes, Wikispecies, Wikinews, Wikebooks, Wikiversity, Wiktionary, Wikisource, and Meta-Wiki. I goggled Wiki and found out that it the Hawaiian word for speed. Wikipedia's founder was at an airport in Honolulu and was told to take the Wiki Wiki Shuttle to the next gate.¹ I was surprised to find out that Wikipedia has a need for photo submissions and that there is a spot for project coordination.
I selected option B to select three education related Wikipedia articles and compare them to an encyclopedia. What I found was encyclopedias may be a thing of the past. The local library had one set - the World Book Encyclopedia. This source did not produced any matches on my subjects neither did the online version of Britannica.
Wikipedia offers so much for students today. An internet search can lead one to lots of other learning, by accident – that is how I found one of my wiki articles. When I do a search it always lead to other things – so students may learn more. The Internet and Wikipedia may be the only search option for students who live great distances away from their library, or as I learned unexpectedly, from a library that doesn't keep very good evening hours when parents can take a child to the library(some in our area closed at 5 or 6 p.m. and had limited Saturday hours). Searching on the internet is faster and easier and it can be done in the comfort of ones home too. With the crazy schedules families are leading today it just works out better.
Colbert's satire on using Wikipedia was very funny and using humor is a great way to get a message across. His point was very clear that not all the information on this site is true and can change at any given minute. Teachers will just have to set clear directions and expectations of using internet searches.
Another issue of families today is money. The rising costs of education these days, schools are making cuts big time and usually at the expense of the student. E-books or open-source books can make a huge financial difference. The companies getting in on this now will be the leaders in this field of economic development. The ability of teachers being able to pick and choose the chapters they need make a lot of sense instead of having huge expensive books where only part ever gets read. And now with technology, chapters can be scanned in and read without purchasing the book. There probably is a little bit of a fear going into the open-source book production but two of the country's largest states, Texas and California have made new laws to allow the implementation of these books to start. Here we go into the age of the Internet.
Photo take from the internet on 1-22-2011 from:
¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
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