Things You Should Know in History Classroom

The summer of 2006 saw Wikipedia emerge on the historical scene as a full-blown phenomenon. Roy Rosenzweig's commodity in the Journal of American History combined with an engrossing betrayal in the Atlantic to push the online encyclopedia to the fore of academic discussion.i We've all also worried about students who apply net sources and especially about the reliability of a open up-source source such as Wikipedia. The combination of the reading, the worry, and the incessant damning of Wikipedia by colleagues led me to (re)consider my pedagogical policy towards Wikipedia .

Many history professors ban vaguely defined "net sources" as if the means of acquisition determines a source's reliability. This distinction has increasingly lost its pregnant as many of us (and most of our students) would rather admission fifty-fifty the American Historical Review in its digital format than its jump volumes in the stacks. I decided that in calorie-free of this transformation, I would comprehend Wikipedia instead of banning it, and use the feel every bit an educational experience for my students—a way to expose them to the idea that history is "created" rather than "discovered."

I take a confession to make—I am a "Wiki-victim." In the course of researching for a biweekly local history column that I write, I turned to Wikipedia for a quick respond to a question I had. As it turned out, the information was incorrect, and that error fabricated its way into impress—much to my embarrassment. The error was a simple transposition of ane word, but in the specific context I was writing, that small-scale error took on a completely unlike significance. I had every bit much reason as any ane of my students to doubtfulness the validity of Wikipedia as a source.

What is well-nigh troubling about the "anti-Wiki" movement is that it tends to unmarried out Wikipedia for being an online source rather than for beingness an encyclopedia. It had been my policy in the past only to assume that encyclopedias were out of premises in higher-level work no matter what their origin. But noting the uproar most Wiki's reliability fabricated me rethink that mental attitude. In June 2006, T. Mills Kelly of the blog Edwired asked, apropos of the growing controversy nearly (and usage of) Wikipedia : "Then, what'due south a history teacher to exercise? The same things we've always washed with new resources. We have to pattern learning opportunities for our students that help them to see the strengths and weaknesses of whatever resource." 2

In the context of the swirling fence over Wikipedia , I resolved to take Kelly's injunction seriously, and create such a learning activity for use in my U.South. history survey courses at Carroll College in Waukesha, Wisconsin. The assignment that I designed required students to read Wikipedia . I wanted to bring the new encyclopedia into the classroom then that we could subject area it to intensive test, compare it to other sources, and have a semester-long discussion about different means that history tin be studied, and different ways that information technology can be made. I believed that this consignment would leverage already existing student skills and provide a good jumping-off bespeak to a give-and-take of the "underside" of history.

My main goal was to expose students to the thought that historical knowledge is created. The whole Wikipedia controversy seemed to me to be a dispute over legitimate means by which knowledge is created and verified. On one side, nosotros had academic historians claiming that their expertise gave their interpretations weight. On the other, nosotros had the Wikipedia advocates who claimed that the "wisdom of the crowds" would ensure the accurateness and veracity of Wikipedia 's information. A study of Wikipedia would allow my class to explore the ways in which history is "created," and to practice the skills of deciding between different sources of data. Armed with these goals, I headed to the classroom convinced that I'd created a winner. Nosotros'd hash out the philosophy of history in terms that the students would understand. I was certain that I'd stumbled beyond a Great Thought that would transform my classroom.

The Assignment

The assignment as I designed it contained iii assessed elements.

Role I of the assignment was to consist of in-class student presentations. Students would choose topics that related to historical material we'd exist discussing in class so that the content of their presentations would non be isolated. They would be required to compare the Wikipedia article on the assigned topic to entries in other encyclopedias. They were to and then present that comparison to boyfriend students, describing how the different encyclopedias presented their topics in different ways. With regard to Wikipedia , they were to investigate the entry, looking in particular at the discussions/histories of the articles.

Part II in the process would be a written newspaper. In this paper, students were to reprise their findings from the oral presentation, and add a comparison between the encyclopedia manufactures and some bookish literature. Each of these papers would then be posted to the class web site so they could exist read past the entire grade. The online papers were to institute the source material for Part Three of the semester-long process.

Function 3 was a concluding paper, designed to be a capstone for the course work. For this last newspaper, the students would use the papers already presented during the semester every bit their sources as they developed an caption of how process (wiki or expertise) interacts with information to produce noesis.

I not only had a great idea, I thought, but also the perfect teaching and evaluation plan to implement it. What could be improve?

The Thought in the Classroom

Like many "corking" ideas, nonetheless, this i too fell apart immediately upon contact with the real world. I had naively causeless that my students would be aware of Wikipedia 's existence, if non well-informed about its pitfalls. Merely a survey of the grade at our first meeting revealed that but 7 of the 28 students nowadays knew what Wikipedia was, and even these seven offered varied responses to my questions (one pupil memorably called it a "liberal informative encyclopedia on the internet"; another opined that it was "not fully true"). Faced with this shocking lack of exposure, I knew I had to modify my brilliant assignment plan.

I had already decided—as function of my teaching plan—to spend some time at the beginning of the course to introduce the students to bones questions through discussions about the nature of historical cognition and background reading about Wikipedia (mainly in the form of the already cited manufactures, Roy Rosenzweig's discussion of "open up source" history, and Align Poe's investigation of "wiki-culture" that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly). I at present realized that the introductory discussion had to exist more elaborate. Our extended discussion of these two articles exposed the students taking the form to different perspectives on the relative importance of the Wiki-controversy and did announced to open up their optics to the of import issues of trust involved in selecting any source. Many students fumbled towards a "how tin can we know that what Wikipedia says is truthful?" line of questioning, and their more advanced (or more cynical?) peers took the next pace and began to raise—perhaps unwittingly—fundamental epistemological questions—"How do we know anything is true?"

It was at this bespeak that I introduced the notion of expertise. Historians, I told them, spend their lives learning how to evaluate documents and communicate their findings. They develop great skill to balance differing ideas. Many students were not set to engage with this concept; what was, they seemed to wonder, so hard nearly finding the truth? Expertise did non count for much, it seemed, in the face of the collective wisdom of the "open source" model of Wikipedia. Facts were facts, the students appeared to be saying. How could boring old historians compare with the knowledge possessed by every person on the planet? Each week, as students fabricated presentations virtually their assigned Wikipedia manufactures, we heard that the Wiki-manufactures were longer, more informative, more detailed, and, interestingly, better illustrated. They even included lists of sources and outside reading. The students were thus participating in the creation of source textile, and were also engaging in an analysis of that source material to come up to some conclusions most how historical knowledge is made.

But non anybody was happy. A few students noticed that the articles they had examined were poorly written, had been subject area to repeated vandalism, or contained dubious claims. Out of these rumblings, a pocket-sized cadre of students emerged that challenged the early class consensus that appeared to be in favor of Wikipedia. This claiming reoriented grade presentations from being overwhelmingly positive to being at least partly disquisitional towards Wikipedia and its method. Those who had found nothing out-of-the ordinary most Wikipedia began to see what the "doubters" were talking about. A small group of students thus brought the ideals of the consignment to life. A fellow student raising an epistemological issue on her own initiative is a powerful engine for classroom discussion and student reflection. This sea-alter in classroom attitude was reflected in the terminal papers, which had a distinctly different tone than many of the first round of papers

The last papers—based on a disquisitional analysis of the papers presented and posted earlier—revealed that the consignment had changed their minds virtually Wikipedia. Most students explained that they thought the Wikipedia articles were the best available, but were conspicuously non sufficient as a single-source. However, most of them also ended that this was due to the encyclopedia orientation. They found, simply as Rosenzweig had, that Wikipedia accuracy was more or less the aforementioned equally regular encyclopedias. Nevertheless, many students as well ended that they had nagging doubts nigh trusting the content of a Wikipedia article. Interestingly, the reason for their doubtfulness was their sense that they lacked plenty knowledge to be able to challenge or verify the information themselves. After a semester of word, the upshot was a sincere, self-witting awareness of the limitations on certainty in human (and historical) knowledge.

Conclusions

The assignment scheme was successful in its primary aim—getting students to sympathise and internalize the idea that history wasn't absolutely "true." Nigh all students demonstrated sensation of this idea to some degree. Philosophically, a great deal was achieved. Many students reported that the assignment fabricated them retrieve in ways they never had. These outcomes are desirable, and can likely be repeated.

Problems were articulate in some of the specifics of the assignment. The biggest weakness came in the form of the course presentations. Week after week, nosotros heard the same phrases, the same analysis, and the aforementioned concepts repeated. Since presentation and paper due dates were staggered, student progress was not uniform. The groups that presented early on showed marked development beyond the course of the semester; those that presented later did not announced to larn from the reports they heard before it was their plow to present.

Some other difficulty arose from my use of the question "Who makes history?" Some students grasped that this question referred to the history that we were reading. But some never got past the concept that "people" make history past their actions. Every bit a consequence, they were not able to engage the concept of historical noesis being created. This divide suggested that I may have been also ambitious in expecting such a complicated concept to fit into a first-yr-level survey course.

These caveats aside, student comments were largely favorable. I am heading dorsum to the drawing board to create more defined assignments that are less aggressive and more than "progressive" across the semester. Another outcome for a course of this size is the time/schedule nexus. In my instance, I was education one night a week for 3.5 hours. In a three meetings/week state of affairs, I believe that the presentations would exist less intrusive to overall class time, since they could be presented i or two at a fourth dimension, instead of three to four each week. By allowing the presentations to be ever present, yet in the background, the philosophical concepts at stake could exist subject to more repetition and still seem less repetitious.

In reporting about this educational activity plan, I am reminded that the same issues always apply to good pedagogy, no matter how high-tech the topic might seem. The Wikipedia controversy isn't (or shouldn't exist) most technology or internet sources. Rather, it should be grounded in skills that historians have been instruction for years: disquisitional thinking, source analysis, and comparative approaches. The students were quick to realize this; we should exist, too.

—Christopher Miller recently defended his dissertation on 19th-century suburbanization in Milwaukee. He has been teaching every bit an adjunct for the past three years at several area colleges, including Carroll College, where this assignment was used. His major interests include urban and suburban history, and the emerging scholarship of educational activity.

Notes

1. Roy Rosenzweig, "Can History Be Open Source?" Journal of American History 93:ane (June 2006): 117–146 and Marshall Poe, "The Hive" The Atlantic Monthly (Sept 2006).

ii. Edwired blog, http://edwired.org, June xiv, 2006, past Mills [Kelly].

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Source: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/may-2007/strange-facts-in-the-history-classroom

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