Citizen Journalists, Wikis, and a Culture of Misinformation

I recently attended a conference devoted to an information-management system for online teaching and learning. Good conference, but one session wherein participants had a discussion about how OUR (instructors') learning has changed as a result of online teaching and learning ruffled my feathers a bit.

It was my opinion that too many in attendance were speaking too highly of the information attainable today via the Internet. It's easy, they said, always accessible (if you have the right technology and have it with you always, as some do, it truly is), and easy to digest. Furthermore--and this where I think we really get into some trouble--it is easy to push out to students. My stance is that more information is not necessarily better, and easily digestible information does not a more literate or informed society make.

I am seeing in our communication system a proliferation of bullets, dashes, summaries, and text messages. I believe this is resulting in the erosion of our language. Think about it for a minute, and I think you'll see it too. Some of you will remember listening to your professors address a class and sounding as if they were reading from a well-written book, with metaphor, analogy, and nuance. Not only does that nuance of language work toward a better, clearer understanding of things; our understanding and use of it is a necessity in our increasingly complex society. That is, so long as having people fully understand what you are trying to say is important.

I believe that the proliferation of information via the Internet is a good thing for some, but not for many purposes. Wikis are particularly dangerous tools, especially when they are used under the guise of a catalogue of fact. Indeed, some information found on Wikipedia is fact, but this only exacerbates the problem; because some of the information IS factual, it becomes easy for people to believe they can continually go back to this source for more factual information.

One point that I brought up at the conference session was that Wikipedia and other wikis are akin to a current journalism epidemic: the "citizen journalist." Citizen journalists' stories (wrought with opinion, and more often not written with the rigor, discipline, or research required of professional journalists) are often printed within main sections of a newspaper, and presented in a way that makes them indistinguishable from stories written by professional journalists. My point was not well-received, as one person pointed out that our newspapers routinely publish stories that are not entirely true and that a newspaper or trusted news source does not necessarily present better information than what is written by an average citizen and available on the Internet. I emphatically disagree, for the same reason I disagree with the concept of the citizen journalist. When a public is presented with fact and news, that public should be able to expect its news and information sources to have done research. In tandem with much of the easily digestible, summarized, and unresearched information on the Internet, our news and information sources' adoption of citizen journalists is, in my opinion, resulting in a culture of the misinformed.

So, am I suggesting a ban on the use of the Internet in teaching? Absolutely not. I am suggesting that we, educators, need to be increasingly cautious and vigilant in the presentation of information to our students, especially in online environments. I am suggesting that now--perhaps more than ever--all educators must be guardians of language. Our work is most definitely changing as a result of the online revolution in higher education. We must accept that that online education is here to stay, but we don't have to let it degrade our students' (or our own) learning experience.