photo © 2007 throwthedamnthing | more info (via: Wylio)
Wanna get librarians talking? Talk about Wikipedia. But an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education talks about a new challenge for educators. Referencing the Project Information Literacy report (it’s very good and worth a read)that shows that overwhelmingly, college students use Wikipedia as a pre-search or launching pad tool that gets them moving toward other sources, the article posits that academics had better populate Wikipedia sites with great links if they want their students going to better sources.

Want folks going to better sites? Put those links on the Wikipedia page yourself.

Here’s one example mentioned in the article:

Wikipedia Comes of Age – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education via kwout

Is this a role for librarians?

Our preservice teachers in the UM School of Education’s Teaching with Technology course are required to lead a 20-minute Webinar on the pedagogical uses of a Web 2.0 tool and to create an accompanying how-to screencast to go along with it. This project wasn’t my idea, but I love how it forces the preservice teachers into separating the WHY from the HOW.

One of the tools that our students Farrah, Jen, and Eleni dug up was Twiddla. Here’s Farrah narrating a screencast of this rather amazing Thneed of a tool. You won’t believe everything that it can do for you … for free! And it has Etherpad intergration … and Etherpad is one of my favorite easy wiki-like collaborative authoring tools.

The team even points out that an educator account gives you freemium features for free.

I’m embedding it here, but it looks even better full-screen, so you can click through if you prefer.

My mom, when I was a kid, used to quote those Lucky Dog dog food ads that said, “I’m a lucky dog.” When I see outstanding work like this from students who are headed into K-12 classrooms, I’m a lucky dog indeed. And so are their future students. Check it out!

PS – It takes a lot of guts to let your professor post your work to a larger audience. So if you have feedback for them, they’d love to hear it! Thanks!

Microsoft’s Encarta encyclopedia is being phased out.  Ah, the waves of nostalgia about the good old days when the world fit on just a few CDs.  The New York Times blogger credits the phase-out of this resource (both online and on DVD) to Wikipedia’s popularity, but I like to think that librarian-heralded statewide encyclopedia and database purchases had a little something to do with why it became less popular in schools, for example. 

Be sure to read the comments, including one from an Encarta developer about why Funk and Wagnall’s data was considered easier to use than Encyclopedia Brittanica.