Tools: Wikipedia

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

General presentation of the tool :

Wikipedia is the main and biggest free access and free content encyclopedia online. With almost 5 million articles available in English, Wikipedia is a huge network of data. This project uses the fact that Wikipedias’ articles are densely hyperlinked and that any given topic can be reached from another one through a few clicks.

The idea beyond this project is to show the students that anything they learn, even the most (apparently) tedious, can be (quickly) linked to something they are strongly interested in.

The big idea : "How to use Wikipedia in the classroom to answer the “Do we need to know that ?” question" :

To make it simple and enjoyable, here’s a video presenting my web-based project. I also invite you to read the procedure below which gives you an example of how to use it in your classroom. Finally, I apologize for my Parisian accent which I forgot to tune down during this recording…

How to proceed :

Let’s assume that all students have an electronic device and access to internet:

- Start by asking your students to write their favorite “thing” (singer, sport, food, passion…) on a piece of paper, mix them all up and ask each student to pick a new piece.

- Ask you student to go on the Wikipedia article corresponding to the subject being currently studied in the class.

- Starting from this page, ask them to reach the article corresponding to the paper they picked previously. You can restrict the number of clicked links to spice it up (for example, no more than 5 links between the initial and final articles).

- To make it pedagogically valuable, their “wikisurf” must be written and explained. The path through which they reached their article must be given but the story they will produce from that is even more important. They will have to look for information so they will read and learn something from it. As they all started from the same page, there’s a great opportunity to share these different stories. Asking students to tell their wikisurf through a screen video sounds also like a great option.

There are several ways to adapt this idea (minimal or fixed number of clicks, restricted topics, going from the “fun” topic to the “classroom” one). If needed, there’s also a “random article” option on wikipedia’s left column.

From a TPACK point of view :

This project is designed to address the issue that students often do not link what they learn with what they know and/or like. “Will we ever need to know that?” is actually a question that you can often hear in the science classroom because many concepts appear very fundamental at first sight. It is totally understandable but I consider that science learning must fueled by curiosity to be efficient.

Wikipedia has a proven reputation in education worldwide. All topics are densely inter-linked, reliable and available easily. Therefore, using Wikipedia to let students make links between what they learned and what they see as more concrete is a very powerful way to address the above issue. These “Wikisurfs” (pedagogy) are many opportunities to expand the content knowledge of the students. What is also pedagogically interesting to me is that this expansion will be driven by the students themselves and will thus have multiple directions. Of course, the connection to the initial topic could be quite weak after a few clicks but until the third degree, the content skimmed by the students will probably still be strongly linked to the initial content. Then, they will link it further to what they like and I think that it will definitely help them to memorize and realize that the starting topic is finally not so obscure.

Cautions/Heads-Up :

Wikipedia being access free, content free and dedicated to global education, there are no fees, privacy concerns or restrictions in using it in the classroom.