Inexcusable Froth from BBC Scotland’s Newsdrive

Posted on | November 26, 2009 | 8 Comments

The BBC Newsdrive programme on Radio Scotland decided to run a piece yesterday (25th November) on Ollie Bray’s perfectly sensible suggestion that young learners should be encouraged to make use of Wikipedia in their school research. The BBC Scotland news team hauled in Oliver Kamm on the basis of his Times Online piece about Wikipedia – it’s “….an anti-intellectual venture to its core” apparently, according to Kamm. It is, of course, nothing of the kind – there is nothing in the Wikipedia model that makes it anti-intellectual in any way to anyone other than an intellectual elitist. Interestingly, however, as we shall see, it is Kamm himself who, in the interview above, offers the strongest rationale for using Wikipedia in the classroom!

The 4-minute piece above is simply dreadful. We get a couple of utterly banal questions from Mhairi Stuart:

….isn’t it quite nice though as a different approach? That’s what’s fresh about it….

and

….however in this day and age, I mean, what people do is, if they don’t use Wikipedia they simply Google it, don’t they, and they’ll believe anything on the internet – that’s part of the problem of the World Wide Web….

“…they’ll believe anything on the internet…” – no problems of balance there, then?

Bill Whiteford, for once, actually asks a fairly sensible question towards the end, even if it does pander somewhat to the intellectual snobbery and prejudice of Kamm.

As for Kamm, he did say this:

….ephemera and froth are what many wikipedia editors know but in the case of real knowledge there are some articles clearly that are well researched and thorough and done by experts and some that are total rubbish. My point is not the balance between the two, it is that you don’t actually need credentials and authority and expertise to join in….

‘Real knowledge’ indeed. An interesting concept.

What strange nether world would we have to inhabit before we could choose to operate an education system in which only sources that can demonstrably prove their “…credentials and authority and expertise…” would be deemed acceptable for use in conducting any kind of research, at whatever level? Even if Kamm were correct in his very partial assumptions, it would be an incredibly irresponsible teacher, school or curriculum that would choose to ignore a tool that is being used by millions, and to indisputably good effect by a proportion of those millions on a daily basis.

Is it not, after all, a teacher’s responsibility to teach young people how to use information sources – any and all sources – with due care and diligence? And what better tool, even in Kamm’s highly overplayed terms, to deploy with young learners – helping them to learn how to differentiate between useful and questionable sources, how to check the credentials of sources, how to carry out all the functions of a sensible researcher, how to seek out as many different sources as possible to verify your information – than Wikipedia? I doubt very much that Ollie Bray is suggesting that only Wikipedia should be used in this context – that would be absurd. The notion that Wikipedia should be ignored is equally absurd. Ollie knows that. I know that. Many more sensible (and authoritative and expert) teachers and educationists across Scotland and elsewhere know that. But BBC Scotland News knows better, as the precise and knowledgeable questions from Mhairi Stuart quoted above demonstrate.

Kamm betrays his own arrogance and elitism by acknowledging that Wikipedia is a mixed bag. He, it seems, can be trusted to differentiate the bad from the good, but we must not expose mere schoolchildren to the apparent shambles that is Wikipedia. How on earth will they cope? They might even read some tosh about vacuous celebrities, the poor dears.

This all-too-typical piece (lately) of froth and ephemera from BBC Scotland News inflicted a huge disservice on an authoritative and expert educator who makes a valid point about the use in school of a key source of information today. For the BBC to treat Ollie Bray, and the subject, in such a trivial way is inexcusable. It would seem that the ‘authority and expertise’ of a London journo carries more weight with BBC Scotland News than a highly experienced and thoughtful educator working in our very own education system. Where is the journalist in BBC Scotland who is able to treat Ollie’s question, along with so many other perfectly sound and rational questions around education, with the respect and the intellectual rigour they deserve. He or she does not work on Newsdrive, it would seem.

Technorati Tags: bbc scotland, newsdrive, wikipedia, education, ollie bray, journalism, oliver kamm, knowledge

Category: authority, education, elitism, internet, journalism, knowledge, learning, literacy, teaching, technology

Comments

8 Responses to “Inexcusable Froth from BBC Scotland’s Newsdrive”

Twitter Trackbacks for Inexcusable Froth from BBC Scotland’s Newsdrive : John Connell: The Blog [johnconnell.co.uk] on Topsy.com
November 26th, 2009 @ 6:54 am

[...] Inexcusable Froth from BBC Scotland’s Newsdrive : John Connell: The Blog http://www.johnconnell.co.uk/blog/?p=2317 – view page – cached The BBC Newsdrive programme on Radio Scotland decided to run a piece yesterday (25th November) on Ollie Bray’s perfectly sensible suggestion that young learners should be encouraged to make use… Read moreThe BBC Newsdrive programme on Radio Scotland decided to run a piece yesterday (25th November) on Ollie Bray’s perfectly sensible suggestion that young learners should be encouraged to make use of Wikipedia in their school research. The BBC Scotland news team hauled in Oliver Kamm on the basis of his Times Online piece about Wikipedia – it’s “….an anti-intellectual venture to its core” apparently, according to Kamm. It is, of course, nothing of the kind – there is nothing in the Wikipedia model that makes it anti-intellectual in any way to anyone other than an intellectual elitist. Read less [...]
Jim Henderson
November 26th, 2009 @ 7:20 am

As a Social Subjects teacher in Scotland, Ollie will have been teaching his pupils evaluation skills and to think critically. It’s part of the core courses in the Scottish system and indeed the pupils are marked on their ability to apply these skills.
On the issue of how reliable Wikipedia is as a source why not look at what it says about itself on this matter. “The reliability of Wikipedia, compared to both other encyclopedias and more specialized sources, is often assessed in several ways, including statistically, by comparative review, by analysis of the historical patterns, and by strengths and weaknesses inherent in the Wikipedia process.
Because Wikipedia is open to collaborative editing and can be edited anonymously, assessments of its reliability usually include examinations of how quickly false or misleading information is removed. An early study conducted by IBM researchers in 2003 (not long after Wikipedia started in 2001, see History of Wikipedia) found that “vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly–so quickly that most users will never see its effects “[1] and concluded that Wikipedia had “surprisingly effective self-healing capabilities.”[2]
An investigation reported in the journal Nature in 2005 suggested that for scientific articles Wikipedia came close to the level of accuracy of Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of “serious errors.”[3] These claims have been disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica.[4]” A lot more on this can be found here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
OllieBray
November 26th, 2009 @ 7:39 am

Thanks for your response here John – I’ve posted my own comments over on my site. I now await contact from the BBC…

Interesting times ahead!

OB
David Gilmour
November 26th, 2009 @ 8:42 am

“You don’t actually need credentials and authority to join in.”

Never mind Wikipedia, this might just be an apposite description of this poorly researched, unbalanced journalism.

Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times. He joined the paper in 2008, having been an investment banker and co-founder of a hedge fund. His main areas of interest include economic policy, foreign affairs and European literature. He also writes a weekly column about language.

Source

This makes an interesting contrast with Ollie Bray’s “credentials and authority”, from which I’m sure he’ll get over me including a short extract:

* BSc (Hons) Geography, 1st Class, University of Plymouth
* PGDE Geography (with ICT elective) University of Edinburgh
* Full Registration from the Scottish GTC
* Scottish Qualification for Headship (SQH)
* Postgraduate diploma in education leadership and management (University of Edinburgh)
uberVU - social comments
November 26th, 2009 @ 9:19 am

Social comments and analytics for this post…

This post was mentioned on Twitter by JConnell: Inexcusable froth from BBC Scotland News – http://bit.ly/5r0ppG – authority/expertise in education to be found in a London journo it seems…
Joe Wilson
November 26th, 2009 @ 12:33 pm

What a lot of phoney baloney- a piece designed to rattle tea-cups and raise eyebrows at tea-time.

The BBC should be getting on with real argument which is around ensuring young people and the broader community are digitally literate and have access in schools and homes to the technology that they need to be part of civil society and the knowledge economy.

News International can’t be regarded as independent source on this – bankers or otherwise- they are about to move from free to paid content – in Google wars.

What next a BBC campaign to get learners to stop using Wikipedia ?

Next weeks episode – teacher encourages learners to use computers in class rooms – scandal .. yawn.
Kenneth...
November 26th, 2009 @ 4:25 pm

For me, the irony is at the end of the clip when Mhairi Stuart asks the listner to text in with their opinions! LOL So Wikipedia is bad for allowing users a voice but not Radio Scotland Newsdrive for allowing their listeners a chance to voice their opinions on the air?!?
John Connell
November 26th, 2009 @ 6:28 pm

Maybe they check the credentials, expertise and authority of everyone who sends in a text…or maybe not……