Digital Literacy and Wikipedia (of course)

A timely article on why it is important that we teach students new literacies is at Science Progress. An excerpt:

And this is why digital literacy is so crucial for educational institutions: we do a fundamental disservice to our students if we continue to propagate old methods of knowledge creation and archivization without also teaching them how these structures are changing, and, more importantly, how they will relate to knowledge creation and dissemination in a fundamentally different way. No longer is an encyclopedia a static collection of facts and figures (although some of its features might be relatively so); it is an organic entity. To educational and policy institutions which, for a substantial portion of history, have maintained control over static codex centered archives—think not only academic libraries, but national ones as well—the shift to an organic structure which they no longer control or solely influence represents a crisis indeed. But to train students in old literacy seems to me to be fundamentally the wrong approach. As Howard Rheingold suggests in Smart Mobs, in the future individuals will be divided between “those who know how to use new media to band together [and] those who don’t.”

There is great material here, including the concept of "collaborative literacy" and that of Wikipedia and other technologies like being "organic." These concepts are connected here, both explicitly and implicitly, to questions of power and authority, which I have long thought were at the heart of why so many people resist and panic about things like Wikipedia. In my former life I was a college professor, teaching composition and introductory film theory. Both topics required introducing students to the forms of literacy and, more importantly, to the critical interpretive skills required to be fully literate. I was invited to give a workshop on information literacy to faculty at a university where I was an adjunct, and it was fascinating to listen to faculty complain about Wikipedia as this non-authoritative text and yet they were hard-pressed to explain where the authority (power) of something like the Encyclopedia Brittanica came from originally, or to account for errors in that text. More to the point, I always asked why professors prohibit students from using Wikepedia in their research papers--my question was, "Shouldn't we be disallowing all encyclopedias as sources in a college research paper?" Students at this level should have been taught or guided beyond encyclopedias and other reference sources--advanced research entails an entirely different set of skills and literacies. But most faculty that I have worked with hold on to the idea of an ideal authority like Brittanica without questioning their attachment.

The article also makes the great point, that has never occurred to me, that most Wikipedia users are tech-savvy and tend to have science and/or engineering backgrounds, and that in the sciences and related fields there is more acceptance of Wikipedia and most of the entries in that field are highly sophisticated. This makes me sad--will the humanities be left behind just because of some resistance to new technologies and new literacies? Or will the sciences and humanities drift farther apart rather than developing their related topics and literacies--Da Vinci was a scientist and an artist, and I often wonder if he would have been able to bridge the gaps that are becoming more apparent with the development of new technologies and the skills necessary to use them smartly and creatively . . .