The Guardian Unlimited has a story about an International Relations professor who has seen the light on Wikipedia. She's assigning students Wikipedia entries on Middle Eastern politics and having them contribute to the discussion:
Nicola Pratt, a lecturer in international relations, said she used to be "one of the disgruntled crown of academics who berate students for using Wikipedia in their essays" but is now convinced it can be a great opportunity for students to see at first hand how knowledge is produced.
As this professor notes, Wikipedia is a useful site of knowledge production. If we read it merely as a site of knowledge consumption we are 1) ignoring that all knowledge is produced by reader/writers; 2) chopping off half of what Wikipedia does and limiting its usefulness.
"The atoms, as their own weight bears them down plumb through the void, at scarce determined times, in scarce determined places, from their course decline a little- call it, so to speak, mere changed trend. For were it not their wont thuswise to swerve, down would they fall, each one, like drops of rain, through the unbottomed void; and then collisions ne'er could be nor blows among the primal elements; and thus nature would never have created aught."
-Lucretius, Of The Nature of Things
My name is Jim Brown and I'm a Ph.D. Candidate in Rhetoric at the University of Texas. I teach courses in Rhetoric, Literature, and New Media. This blog mostly focuses on my academic work, but you'll also find occasional posts about music or baseball. I also maintain two other blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings by viewing this RSS feed. I'm a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. This lets you know that I'm kind of a masochist and explains the name of my dog.

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