And that is a good thing, right? I'm sure many will argue with me on this point, but after reading James P. Purdy's "The Changing Space of Research: Web 2.0 and the Integration of Research and Writing Environments" I know I'm not alone in my way of thinking. A few post back (quite a few I think) I lamented the fact that many in education, particularly higher Ed, forbid the use of Wikipedia as research. I hear, and see, this all the time. I hear colleagues complaining that students use Wikipedia for a resource in the papers, and I see it in assignments sheets: the big, bold, all caps command, DO NOT USE WIKIPEDIA or WIKIPEDIA NOT ALLOWED or some other such command.
Those who have this pedagogy are doing a disservice to their students. If these educators would teach their students HOW to use Wikipedia instead on forbidding it, they would be teaching them not only critical thinking skills, but as Purdy argues, they also would be teaching them that research in the Web 2.0 environment is very interactive. So why do they object? Purdy argues that "these critics object to Wikipedia's frequent revision by anyone because this ongoing textual revision renders texts unreliable: the research-text-being-written cannot be trusted as a source of knowledge. They, in other words, object to a public research space being writable" (50).
That one statement says it all! Research in Web 2.0 is WRITABLE. With Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 technologies, we have the opportunity to produce knowledge and contribute to research rather than be only passive consumers. What better way to teach students how to think critically than to have them critiquing the research they find and possibly correcting or contributing to that very research?
It's time that those who use Web 2.0 become leaders in guiding others how to use these technologies. Wikis, blogs, Zotero, Mendeley, and other technologies can allow students to become a part of the conversation, rather than being passive consumers who take it all in and then regurgitate back to us in papers that lack any real meaning.
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