Evaluating scholarly sources with Wikipedia

From Library Instruction Wiki

More and more I'm starting to believe that what I teach about finding good sources and evaluating those sources will have no impact without the help of faculty in the disciplines really demonstrating to students how they expect that the sources students find in their research will contribute to learning and performance in class. In other words, I can show students how to find scholarly sources, but unless they want to do that it won't matter.

With that in mind, I was excited to see this contributionto (http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/18864.html) a discussion on Cliopatria (http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html) (a collaboratively authored blog on issues of professional interest to historians) about Wikipedia. I really liked the idea of using Wikipedia as a jumping-off point to talk about what we mean when we talk about scholarly sources - what they are, what they aren't and how they can help students learn. Maybe most importantly, I liked that this professor used the wiki-source to start a discussion about how students should be evaluating ALL of the sources they use.

The original article is available here: http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/18864.html (http://hnn.us/blogs/2.html)

--amd 17:48, 14 Dec 2005 (America/Los_angeles)