Prosumers and Wikipedia

A couple of days ago I watched “Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition” by Daniel Anderson. To tell you the truth I wasn’t very impressed and let me tell you why. I don’t know if he was just trying to show all that you can do with a little knowledge of computers but I just thought that there was always way too much stuff going on at once. It was very hard for me to follow what was going on and concentrate on the message that he was trying to get across. I had to go back and listen to things over many times and I still didn’t understand most of what was going on.

I did pull out some information from the site though and what I understood I thought it was very interesting and he had some good ideas. The first thing was called the “computing prosumer” which I understood to be the “convergence of professional and rookie digital equipment.” This has been assisted by relatively inexpensive and consumer friendly digital (computers, editing equipment, video cameras) equipment. I think it is a great idea to introduce low-level technology to people who aren’t very good with technology. It may give those people a foot-in-the-door and maybe they will come to enjoy using digital equipment.

One statement that kind of stuck out to me was by Diana George who said, “students have a great deal of experience with new media communications technologies such as visual communication.” As soon as I heard this I linked it back to the end of our class on Thursday where we talked about technology being implemented in schools as soon as kindergarten. I think that the more people use computers, video cameras, etc. the more they will be comfortable with them and want to use them. Going back to the end of Thursdays’ class I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed it. I feel like I can talk about stuff like that for hours.

Another thing that we talked about it class was the use of Wikipedia when doing research in the article “A Stand Against Wikipedia”. There were two comments from Becky Bs’ blog that I found really interesting. The first one was when she said that a student has to start researching somewhere. I totally agree with her. I think that it is ridiculous to ban an educational (yes I know not all of it is correct) site when researching a topic. It could be a good way to get some other resources for the topic you are interested in. The other thing that I found interesting was when she questioned why people would even want to cite an encyclopedia. I don’t ever remember being told by a teacher that a student shouldn’t cite encyclopedias. And maybe I could have been spacing out but our class discussion on Thursday was the first time that I have ever really talked about Wikipedia. I never knew that anyone can go on the site and put whatever information they wanted. Which brings up a question that I had about Wikipedia. I was always taught (I guess I was taught wrong) that if a website ended in .org that it could be counted on as a truthful website. Maybe whoever reads this can comment and maybe explain to me why I don’t understand.

The last thing to kind of sum up “A Stand Against Wikipedia” was the last couple of paragraphs when Steven Bell commented on the use of Wikipedia. I thought the best statement was when he said, “a better approach would be to teach students how to ‘triangulate’ a source like Wikipedia, so they could use other sources to tell whether a given entry could be trusted”. That in a nutshell is how I think teaching should be handled. Not to just say that something is banned but teach how and why not to use whatever is in question.