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This week I wanted to bring up another post from Melanie McBride, namely, “Authority” v. Wikipedia. While we have had this discussion in class before, about both the benefits of Wikipedia and the drawbacks of students finding bogus websites/ web content, I thought that McBride brought a wonderful pedagogical element into the discussion.

McBride presents the idea of bias among traditional ‘valid’ source materials as making the ‘unvalidated’ reference material of open source online content equally beneficial. Everyone today acknowledges that because history is written by the victors there is going to be a bias in the materials promoted by those sources. McBride’s point is that the social norms that get passed down through the traditional material can be oppressive to groups of students whereas with open source materials, she specifically discusses Wikipedia, the ability to share multiple viewpoints negates those influences.

McBride also presents the interesting issue of sites that allow the public to rate content. With online content that has a ratings feature the number of people who can contribute to checking validity is immense whereas your traditionally peer reviewed materials pass through far fewer hands. Also, having something peer reviewed involves peers, people who more than likely share similar social biases. I know that in creating my PowerPoint when I was looking for optical illusion like the Canadian Flag

I showed in class, I always checked the ratings of the viewed on YouTube first because without fail, the ‘screamers’ and joke videos all had poor ratings or ratings turned off.

Overall, I’m still not sure how I feel about this questions. On the one hand I respect the diverse community input into online content but I don’t worry as much about bad information from traditional sources as I do from the internet. Which of course displays my bias. I think my opinion here is I don’t know.

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