Free Knowledge

In its protest against SOPA Wikipedia shut down their site, offering visitors a line that I found truly obnoxious - "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge." An economist would quibble with the idea that the knowledge one gets is free. Someone worked to gather it, interpret it, write it. At the very least it cost someone time. Perhaps I wouldn't have been bothered as much had it said "Imagine a World Without the Free Exchange of Knowledge" but perhaps I am guilty of hair-splitting.

Wikipedia's attention-grabbing line, however, illustrates a challenge teachers have reaching and engaging the current generation of students. Information has always seemed free to the boys and girls in my class. Previous generations of students (including myself) had to labor more to get knowledge. Students today have always had Google which, of course, nearly always generates Wikipedia among the first hits for any topic researched. It seems like students grew up looking at finding answers as an eater views an all-you-can-eat buffet, while back before the 1990s we had to cook (even if early web applications offered us the researching equivalent of a microwave).

Okay, bad analogies.

Am I being too hard on Wikipedia's boast? Perhaps. After all, public libraries appear "free" to the public. For some reason I find their cause more noble than Wikipedia's, though it's easy to see the digitization of information, the free exchange of ideas, and the publication of ebooks might all seem as noble of efforts (in the long run) to elevate human understanding.

I fear that we're beginning to lose a grasp of the protocol that comes with writing good non-fiction accounts of what has been said or did. Historians and journalists follow a code by which they triangulate evidence and credit the sources of that information. Done well, the works of those professionals reliably contribute to our understanding. Done poorly or sloppily, even with good intentions, a lot of myth-making happens.

It is hard to move students toward an appreciation for creating something deliberately and purposefully than just posting it. And these students will someday be the teachers themselves.