Wikipedia - Arne Duncan / Emmett Till



During the summers, I teach courses for public school teachers.  Last summer it was "Creating Classroom Projects with Technology" (and "ReBoot Camp" for school tech coordinators), while the 3 summers prior I taught in the Web Institute for Teachers (WIT) .

Beyond the curriculum, I always do a few mini-lessons on trends in the online world.  All these things that we take for granted as part of the internet landscape: flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, podcasts, google maps, rss aggregators, imdb, etcetera are all fascinating and scary to a newbies.

Last year, I introduced wikipedia at one of these sessions and consequently had a most interesting discussion.  Some teachers were aghast at the decentralization of "the authority" of the information and couldn't imagine the wikipedia as a credible source, others couldn't help but question the faith we have in the textbook publishers as the arbiters of truth.

During my lecture, in a "look how easy this is" vein, I created the Arne Duncan page in wikipedia.  I thought of this today, as I updated the Emmett Till page to include the school renaming (and updated the James McCosh page to reflect the same).

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Wikipedia credentials.  I have created or edited pages relating to:  Arne Duncan, Vaalwater, Emmett Till, and James McCosh.

Posted: Thu - March 23, 2006 at 08:10 PM      

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