Students Need Google and Wikipedia - Not Memorization

When I was going through high school, I remember the constant struggle against my teachers' anti-Wikipedia policies. This was from 2010-2014. Wikipedia had been around for nearly a decade, and my friends and I (being the savvy tech-club kids) were far more comfortable using it than a conventional encyclopedia. I distinctly remember conversations with my English and History teachers in which classmates and I would argue for permission to use Wikipedia in our research. Not even as a source which we would cite, but as a starting point, a place to find basic information and citations to guide our research in just the same way we were being taught to use a conventional encyclopedia. One teacher allowed us to do this. The rest adamantly insisted that Wikipedia was unreliable. We used it anyway, and simply left it out of our bibliographies (which makes me cringe, in retrospect, but would it have been better for us not to use Wikipedia at all?).

In the twenty-first century, students will be competing for jobs that we as teachers cannot adequately prepare them for, because those jobs don't exist yet. If the half-life for knowledge is 18 months, education that focuses on teaching facts and information is misguided. Research and synthesis skills are central to twenty-first century education, particularly in the Social Studies and Science fields. Students need to be able to find information, analyze it, and think critically and creatively about it. Automation is going to eliminate menial work from the job marketplace, and even some simple technical work, well within the scope of our students' working lives.

Check out this video from Kurzgesagt for more on that depressing thought:

In light of this, kids absolutely need to learn critical thinking skills. The economic role of the human being won't be labor anymore. It will be ingenuity and creativity.

Self-driving cars.
Say goodbye to 7% of the job market.
From: flickr.com, under creative commons.

As teachers, we need to be teaching our students how to access information and learn about their world in a critical and creative way. In order to do that, they need to know how to find trustworthy sources, how to identify the bias of those sources, and how to find alternative viewpoints on the same topic to ensure that they get a well-rounded perspective on whatever they are researching. The "site:" tool (which I didn't know about and which is SUPER cool) will help them narrow their searches to specific perspectives, and the "talk" tab and quality scale on Wikipedia will help them know whether what they find there is reliable (and also where their own expertise might be helpful to Wikipedia!).

I, for one, am thrilled at the prospect of incorporating online information gathering tools into my curriculum. Who cares if students know a random historical fact? They can find it on their phone in like, two minutes! But how do they know that the fact they found is true? Where did it come from, and is it reliable? The focus of our teaching should be on the skills they need to answer those questions, especially in the Social Sciences.