Organic Learning

Jeff Utecht, in his post, Schools: Take control or forfeit your profile, points out that many schools carry an online profile, from entries in places like Wikipedia and FaceBook, that needs to be monitored and maintained. Many schools aren’t even aware of this online presence, or might dismiss an article in Wikipedia as not trusted, so not a priority.
It got me thinking about really reading some of the wikipedia articles about our schools.
These are the schools that I could find that have an entry on Wikipedia:

Bell High School
South Gate High School
Huntington Park High School
South East High School
Maywood Academy
South East Middle School

You can tell that some of the schools have student created entries. Some of the articles are really quite good, but need some editing. Others need quite a bit of work. All haven’t been updated in quite some time - probably since our external IP was banned from Wikipedia. There was abuse to Wikipedia articles from our domain, so Wikipedia has blocked the entire domain from editing. This was a few years ago. As far as I know, no one can update Wikipedia articles from within our district firewall since then.

This causes a problem. If no one is updating these articles, then they will never be of high quality.They will never reflect our schools for some of the great things that happen there. Just this morning, there was an article in the LA Times written about an outstanding new teacher at South East Middle School. (Thanks Paul B. for telling me about it.) That should be linked to the SouthEast Middle School entry.

Since students and teachers can’t access the editing features from within the firewall, maybe we need to find other means of updating and maintaining these entries. Maybe students should have this responsibility as part of their homework. For those with internet access, they could be writing about their schools. What could be more authentic? They could also monitor the pages. This could be a shared responsibility between students, teachers, all staff and parents. The community could join together for something positive. This could be a very positive step into beginning to “get” 21st century literacies.

Thanks, Jeff, for posting this article to spark my thinking. I will be calling together interested educators from all our schools to see if we can figure out how to make this work as an authentic learning experience for all of us. I think this is extremely important.

.. Now if I only knew how to find profiles on FaceBook. All I see are students from those schools, but not much about the schools. I’m sure I’m missing something…

Note: After looking at the history pages of all the entries, it is apparent that some editing and revising has taken place recently. However, there certainly isn’t enough there to represent the schools well. It was interesting to see the discussion on the Bell entry. An alumni from the graduating class of 1965 had entered that the school colors were purple and white, and it had been changed by a more recent graduate. It’s interesting to see how those that contribute collaborate on the writing.

Tags: lausd, wikipedia