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Guiding Student Research

So many instructors become frustrated with students' uses of WikiPedia in papers etc.  The truth is, any academic or professional Wiki is an information source and should be recognized as such. So, how can we help students recognize the differences in courses...?  I have used the following research "tiered" outline for students in various projects:

LEVEL 1 - General Information (this includes Wikis)

LEVEL 2 - Critical Comparisons

LEVEL 3 - Applied Ideas

Provide students with pre-identified examples of each and then methods to synthesize information into ideas and concepts and then action steps to apply those concepts to the topic scope.

What do you use with your students?

Many of my students have no access to computers and sadly, some do not know how to use a computer.

However, they use the computers at the school with internet access that are developed by organizations

such as drugs.com, rxlist, etc. also school access to a library service from the school.

MedMD is far beyond WikiPedia for medical information.

@anncarolynhill :  Great points!  Yes, I agree that the medical sites are much used and that they are more complex than WikiPedia - that is a good example of exploring new information which is used a lot by students.

I would also say that while the distribution of technology is not equal, the affect of new technology is so ubiquitous in our society that most students have already been influenced by new ways of accessing information and the immedicacy of input and output....such as your medical site example.

So, developing tools to help with that desire to explore and find as well as evaluating information is critcal to student success.  The outline I provide in this blog is an example of strategies and tools we can devleop.

Thank you for your post!

one of the main problems with wikis is unverified information. just about anyone may edit information on, say, wikipedia without having that information vetted. 

 

I think that Wikipedia is excellent in terms of general information and the reference list. Because it is not necessarily properly vetted I do not think it should be used in an academic paper. 

 

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