Responses to Chapter 4
Richardson writes that, “everyone together is smarter than anyone alone” (Richardson 61). This gives using Wikipedia a new meaning. It allows teachers to use it to teach a profound lesson that is valuable to both teachers and students. Students can see how beneficial it is to work together with a common goal. This type of behavior has created the amazing informational bank that Wikipedia is.
Richardson suggests that, if you have a student who constructs an amazing research paper, you could allow your student to publish on Wikipedia. This would be great for teaching students how to defend and question their papers. People will likely edit the post, then students can question whether the edit was correct, or their original post was correct. It would spark critical thinking and analysis skills.
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Richardson's quote sounds like the "two heads are better than one" mantra. I agree, to a point. It is interesting that in my class, earlier this year, I had students do an activity by themselves first. Then, I had them collaborate their answers and modify their responses if necessary. What I found out was interesting. I thought that I would find their joint effort scores to be better than their individual responses. However, this was not always the case. Many times, students who were correct the first time, changed their answers after the peer conferencing. I attributed this fact to be based on concepts such as "majority rules" or "popular person's answer dominates all others." Clearly, the majority doesn't always mean authority, nor does it mean more intelligence on a particular issue. If anything, often times it gives students the chance to collectively demonstrate their ignorance on a topic. Hmmmmmm!
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