- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever - Norman Mailer
UK primary schools turn on to Wikipedia
PROPOSED changes to the teaching currriculum in the UK could see primary school kids twatting about on Twitter and delving into the delights of Wikipedia rather than studying the Victorians and discovering that we once had an Empire.
According to a draft of the proposals seen by the Guardian, kids should leave primary school able to access blogs, use a keyboard and be able to spell-check as well as find useful information on the likes of Twitter and Wikipedia - God help them.
The proposals come from the woolly brain of Sir Jim Rose, former head of England's schools watchdog, Ofsted, tasked with the job by schools secretary Ed Balls (up).
According to the Guardian's quick shufty at the proposals, Rose is looking to allow teachers more flexibility in choosing what they teach and wants to get all 21st century by allowing the wibblesome web into the classroom.
The leak of the details to the Guardian caught the Department for Children, Schools and Families on the hop. It recovered a bit last night to say: "Of course pupils in primary school will learn about major periods including the Romans, the Tudors and the Victorians and will be taught to understand a broad chronology of major events in this country and the wider world."
They'll just do so by cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. µ
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"Twatting about on twitter" - surely not
And who will teach the teachers? You can reform all you want on the high levels but when it comes down to it, the teachers are still sorely lacking even in their own field let alone in these new, condensed fields.
I think it is time that people stopped slagging wikapedia off... As a technical director of a software and service bureau (ie a true commercial user who needs to find out stuff and is not just mouth) I find the continual wingeing so 'last year'. Wikapedia is great it has its faults but there are checks and balances with some good controls. It works,.. move on. If kids need to learn stuff then I would prefer they use Wikapedia than some stuff that some guy got paid to write. For my business Wikipedia is a very quick well written (on the whole) and solves real problems saving me time and money. Its works so well we also use the open source software its based on 'MediaWiki' as our knowledge base which is also being used for our iso9001 (etc) documentation system. Is it that people winge because they are too ignorant to contribute? Stop wingeing and make Wikapedia better, you might help teach the worlds kids something.
PH
Wikipedia is not a good teaching tool anyone can go in and edit it and therefore is a bit unreliable. i am a student and i was to use a reference for a lab report or something from that website i would automatically fail it.
"primary school kids twatting about on Twitter"
come again?
The thing with many of these government initiatives is that they only jump on the bandwagon and make official what is already going on across the country in schools. The tone of this article suggests shock horror! kids using wikipedia t school! yet the truth is most of them are far more aux fais with a lot of these things than a lot of the staff are because they use them so much at home. So why not use that to the children's advantage?
I am an assistant headteacher at a primary school, and children at my school reguarly use wikipedia as a source of information for independant research purposes.
There is a much greater emphasis nowadays on independant and creative learning, rather than everyone reading pg 47 of their textbook about the rainforest, children are encouraged to work collaboratively, finding out different aspects of a topic and then putting all their information together. This would be near impossible without the internet.
Internet safety and reliablity of sources are embedded into the curriculum and as long as children are aware of these factors, Wikipedia serves as a very useful source of information where often no other sources are as readily available. (Example research topics - finding out statistics about mountains around the world, writing a biography of a famous person of own choice)
Also, wikipedia seems to be so chock full of self-appointed "truth nazis" that any false information posted is disposed of faster than you could utter the words "citation needed."
More relevant than dead folk ! - take it this refers to Jade Goody!!
primary school kids twatting about ! - odd phrase
schools secretary Ed Balls (up). !
A-tisket A-tasket
A brown and yellow basket
I sent a letter to the ed
and On the way he dropped it
TwattLinq, I suspect
He dropped it
He dropped it
Yes on the way He dropped it
A little girlie picked it up
And put it in her pocket
Gadget loving, I suspect.
I hate to be a rabid nationalist commenter, but these changes apply to England. Education in other areas is devolved.
The proposals themselves seem sensible.
Wikipedia is only good as a reference to certain items. It fails miserably however at those items which are often taken as the truth hence my advice would be to steer well clear.
our children are already lied to in the mass media, last thing we need is to be encouraging them with even more lies with unverified sites like wikipedia.