PL 17/09: Understanding Wikipedia

Today, in the LATINA course, we are looking at the impact and role of Wikipedia.

Immanuel Kant wrote about many areas of philosophy – including esthetics.

The first practical task – lasting 45 minutes – was

1. select three terms from your own professional field of interest
2. write a new blog post listing these terms
3. read and evaluate the corresponding articles in the English version of Wikipedia
4. note your results in the blog post

After that, at 1030, we will have a discussion in class about this particular evaluation, about the quality of Wikipedia and about the use of Wikipedia as an information source in teaching institutions.

We had a lively discussion about the quality and role of Wikipedia relative to printed – or rather edited – encyclopedias. Several cases – for instance this on esthetics – were shown on the smartboard.

The second task – lasting 30 minutes – was

1. create a small learning or presentation resource with materials found through Google or in Wikipedia
2. the resource should be relevant for a real audience – which means it might well be in your own language (Catalan, Hungarian, Norwegian, Spanish)
3. document the resource in a new blog post

After lunch, we worked with Wikipedia in a multilingual and multi-cultural perspective. We started with a sharing of personal experiences related to (non-)communication across languages. After that, participants were asked to create a new (parallell) teaching resource in their own language – taking care to utilize Google Translate and parallell versions of Wikipedia in the process.

Resources

• Global Wikipedia
• Espen Andersen’s Home Page

Tord Høivik

• Plinius in English – and in Norwegian
• Post scriptum
• Flerspråklige ressurser

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