I tagged along to a conference on college and university teaching that was hosted in Traverse City, Michigan last week and naturally couldn't resist dropping in on a session entitled "Using Wikipedia To Teach Critical Thinking Skills". The speaker, Michael Lorenzen, is affiliated with the Park Library of Central Michigan University and is currently the Editor of the Michigan Library Association Forum.

I will reserve my specific remarks on Michael's talk until I am prepared to do a formal style of review, perhaps saving it for the blog — when and if I get around to it. And you all know how that is.

As a generic observation, however, this talk made me slightly more aware than I was before of just how many myths about Wikipedia persist among a population whose critical thinking skills we might have expected to be rather better honed than the average member of the public. It now seems likely to me that I have been spoiled by the level of e-street savvy that prevails in my own local circle. No doubt on account of my own e-fluence. No doubt.

No matter — honing the hone-challenged is what we do.

With regards to his own experience, Michael asserted that he created over 200 articles on Wikipedia. I did not think to ask whether he edited under his own name or not and I cannot find a User:Michael Lorenzen, so maybe we can find his contributions under some other mutation of his nom réel. Or not.

There is, perhaps not incidentally, an AFD that ended in deleting an article on a person who appears to be the same Michael Lorenzen.

In his talk, Michael referred in passing to an article of his in the Michigan Library Association Forum, entitled "Vandals, Administrators, and Sockpuppets, Oh My! An Ethnographic Study of Wikipedia’s Handling of Problem Behavior".

I haven't gotten around to reading this yet, and I'm a few days behind in my other work, but it may be worth a look, if only to give us further insight into the breadth and depth of the information gap that we are charged to cross, so to spark.

I emailed Michael and invited him to join the discussion and give his perspective.

Jon Awbrey

Mr. Lorenzen is known on Wikipedia as User:Wikilibrarian. His user page says he "took an extended vacation from Wikipedia after being harassed by a now banned user." The user in question was User:Gzornenplatz, later banned as a sock puppet of User:Wik.

Lorenzen also seems to have a nice blog called "The Information Literacy Land of Confusion." He appears to be a real stand-up guy, actually!

I'd be a little surprised that he hadn't heard of us before, but it's an awfully big web out there...

Yes, that sounds like a good guess — going by the "Living in Michigan in a Similar Way Litmus Test", also known as the "Petoskey Touchstone". For the moment, however, I will not pursue the question of the speaker's Un-Real Life (URL) unless some facet of it becomes essential to my present focus.

For the present purpose, Michael's talk served as a bellwether, a sleeping dogma waker. He was clearly more familiar with Wikipedia than the rest of the session attendees — this Reporter excepted, of course — and so the fact that I heard him echoing so many Tenets Of Wikipedism with only the barest hints of reflective critique told me that the upper bound of Wikipedia wariness in Academe was fearfully lower than I had previously guessed.

That is a presenting symptom that presents a clear and present challenge to this Review. We simply must exert ourselves to do a better job of Critique, not to mention Hue and Cry, than we have here-2-4 done.


Well, I am shocked to learn that there are ≥ 2 people in Michigan who still know what a library is, much less "mark" student "papers", but I do hope to see … maybe ¬2day, maybe ¬2morrow, but soon … many old myths about sundry subjects sink beneath our wisdom like a Petoskey stone.

Wow !!! — Wik, at least, is famous, even y'know, ¬orious …

At any rate, anyone who fosters pronounceable acronyms like TILLOC (The Information Literacy Land Of Confusion) can't be all good, which is to say, a man after my own ♥ …

Jonny

There is a factor that we encounter with novice computer science students and people who learned their bits of programming theory on the fly. I am talking about the not-so-recent-anymore revival — complete with snakes and tents — of a whole spate of all too wishful dreams about Self-Organizing Connectionist Knowledge Systems (SOCKS). This paradigm was all the rage in the 40's, whimpered out in the 60's, revived again with a vengeance in the 80's, and after that I personally quit paying attention to the fads of this fashion.

There is that Willing Suspension Of Disbelief that lards in the catalytic yeast giving rise to all pleasant fixions, and it's damn near impossible to counteract by any means short of the recalcitrantly deflating hard knocks of real world experience.

Response to the on-topic portions of this post by the Schock Artiste formerly known as Revision —

Most of the Library And Information Science folks that I know are fairly well-attuned to the problems of bringing their clientele up-to-snuff with the skills of Information Literacy that are demanded by the duties of responsible citizenship in our post*modern day and age.

Like any other discipline, however, some disciples are more hip to theory than to practice, some disciples are bent just the opposite way, and there is frequently a gap between the two inclinations that makes for a lack of power in action.

That would be my first guess as to what I observed in the particular session that I attended.

Jon Awbrey

^ This is exactly why I do like Wikipedia. ^

Purple pose is best left to the "clubs" over Claret. Scientific responses to internet clap trap, is a wrong approach. The internet is an asylum, that even Freud (or Jung) couldn't begin to diagnosis and "cure" with talk -- or a strait-jacket.

I wanted to give Michael a couple of days to catch up with the kind of email — and me to catch up with the kind of laundry — that tends to pile up after a week-long conference. Then, of course, all aside from the 50-50 odds that email from a cold address gets robo-shunted to the re*circular dev-ø folder, he may decide, quite understandably, not to risk the Critic Of Puerile Reason with which our merry banned of reprobates tends to fill the rowdy red 1-room schoolhouse of The Wikipedia Review.

Failing that, I can use the printed handouts from Michael's simulated PowerPoint presentation to fund our own discussion of the points occasioned by it.

In the meantime, I did notice one persistent point of confusion that kept arising in the discussion so far. The title of the talk was "Using Wikipedia To Teach Critical Thinking Skills". That rather carefully and deliberately avoids suggesting that the Wikipedia editing process itself necessarily involves any degree of critical thinking — no doubt you'd get a many-splintered opinion about that point depending on whom you ask — it merely suggests that the material and the process espied in Wikipedia affords a springboard for reflective critique.

And that, I think, is indisputable.

Jon Awbrey

Dynamic Page — Excerpts From Michael Lorenzen's Talk

I was hoping that ML himself would turn up and save me the tedium of typing, and maybe even post his talk on our editorial blog, but just in case that doesn't happen I'll begin transcribing excerpts from the printed handouts of his PowerPoint slides.

Jon Awbrey

Conference Title and Theme —


Abstract of Michael Lorenzen's presentation in the conference program —

Amusing → Bemusing incidents from the early history of Wikilibrarian —

• Pre-History
• History

Jonny

I'll continue adding facsimiles of Michael Lorenzen's slides to the dynamic page above and discuss them as I go along. I know we incline toward the informal in this Forum, but Michael's talk was a welcome attempt to address a serious subject in a critical and reflective way, and so I will endeavour to maintain a bubble of temporary sanity around it.

Conference Title and Theme —


Abstract of Michael Lorenzen's presentation in the conference program —




The distinction between doing critical thinking within the fold of the Wikipedia environment and using Wikipedia to teach critical thinking skills ought to be clear. Even if Wikipedia process and Wikipedia product afforded nothing but bad examples of critical thinking — a limit that Wikipedia lies nigh on its parliamentary and policy pages — suitably reflective learners and teachers could still make instructive use of The Wikipedia Experience, through the detection of its defects and the diagnosis of its disorders.

Ripeness is all in that regard.

Jon Awbrey

Here is the text of the relevant part of FRE 201 which govern the use of references in Federal court cases, most state rules of evidence are based on this:


No judge that was informed of the manner in which WP articles "develop" would allow the their use.

Thanks for that gloss, Glass. I had a nagging sense that there was something terribly wrong at this point, and I kept thinking of all those recent newspaper stories about some BADCITY where tons and tonnes of old cases were being reviewed and tossed out on account of the BADCITES that some court officers had used.

Michael mentioned in his talk that he had an interest in political history and especially the biographies of lesser known political figures from the 1800's, but he did not claim any particular judicial or legal expertise.

Jon Awbrey