Brittanica fires a salvo at Web 2.0--Rebuttal?

Hey, all,

My school librarian forwarded the following message to every faculty member K-12 this morning. I haven't pursued the links in this rather incendiary listserv post from the Encyclopedia Brittanica Online folks, but browsing the titles is enough to suggest it's an opening salvo in what may be an escalating debate. What are your thoughts? Do you have any suggestions for resources I might have in my back pocket when I engage in a discussion of this with my week-long Web 2.0 for Education workshop at my K12 school in July? Have any of you been "invited" to this forum discussion?

Passing this on to wiser and more experienced 2.0ers...

Here's the post:

Take a look at Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason

Some interesting food for thought about where/who we are getting our information from and why we should be questioning how this is changing.

[Librarian's signature]

Dear Britannica Online Subscriber,

You are invited to join a unique discussion about education and learning in the information age. On Monday, June 11, Britannica launched the discussion, which is centered on several essays by Michael Gorman, the recently retired Dean of Library Services at California State University (Fresno) and past president of the American Library Association.

Mr. Gorman's subject is the state of learning, education, and information gathering in the era of "Web 2.0." He writes on a wide range of topics, including:

• The importance of authoritative sources on the Internet

• Blogging and the rise of the "citizen journalist"

• The "flight from expertise" in today's interactive online world

Britannica has invited others with a diversity of viewpoints to respond to Gorman's essays. Our goal is to facilitate this ongoing conversation, and we invite you to participate. You can find the Web 2.0 Forum on the Britannica Blog featured on the home page of Britannica Online:

Web 2.0 Forum Schedule & Contributors:

Encyclopædia Britannica will feature several Michael Gorman essays on the Britannica Blog, as well as both supporting and opposing viewpoints.
• Monday, June 11: "Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason, Part I"

• Tuesday, June 12: "Web 2.0: The Sleep of Reason, Part II"

• Wednesday - Friday: Additional discussion
• Monday, June 18: "The Siren Song of the Internet: Part I"

• Tuesday, June 19: "The Siren Song of the Internet: Part II"

• Wednesday - Friday: Additional discussion

• Monday, June 25: "Jabberwiki: The Educational Response, Part I"

• Tuesday, June 26: "Jabberwiki: The Educational Response, Part II"

• Wednesday - Friday: Additional discussion

Some of the expected contributors include:
• Sven Birkerts (Harvard University; author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age)

• Nicholas Carr (noted writer on information technologies and author of The Big Switch: Our New Digital Destiny)

• Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values)

• Thomas Mann (reference librarian, Library of Congress)

• Dan Gillmor (director of Center of Citizen Media and author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People)

• Clay Shirky (consultant, writer on information technologies, and professor in New York University's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program)

• Danah Boyd (fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communications)

• Matthew Battles (formerly of Harvard University's Houghton Library and author of Library: An Unquiet History)

• Scott McLemee (author of the "Intellectual Affairs" column for Inside Higher Ed)

• Robert McHenry (former editor-in-chief, Encyclopædia Britannica)

• Gregory McNamee (veteran freelance writer, author of 25 books, and a weekly contributor to the Britannica Blog) We welcome you to participate in this open discussion, and hope that it is of value to you and your students and patrons.

Best regards,
Rick Lumsden

Director, Institutional Sales & Marketing
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
[ mailto:contact@eb.com ]contact@eb.com
(800) 621-3900

-----------------

This mailing is courtesy of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
© 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Tags: 2.0, Brittanica, authority, debate, information

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Sylvia Martinez on June 13, 2007 at 11:33am

It seems pretty understandable that for every rush to embrace some new cool thing, there will be a backlash.

This is a good thing if this makes people (especially educators) take a bit of a breather and do some deep thinking about the real educational value of new tools or popular theories. If there really is long-term value, having responses to challenges is important. When a board member, parent, community member, teacher or student asks why Web 2.0 tools are important, we need to have a answers grounded in good learning theory and the creation of opportunities for children, not in techie reasons, elusive definitions of "new literacies", or catchy jargon about digital natives.

You could also cynically look at it as Britanica struggling for its own future as a company. Their revenues took a big hit when book sales dried up in 1999, and the expected value of ad rates on their free site collapsed in 2000. I know it was sold to a Swiss banker for what was reported to be half its book value around then. They would naturally join forces with authors selling books repudiating the recent trend to user created content, who are also trying to make a buck.

I'm not discounting either part of their incentive or motivation to promote this point of view.

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Permalink Reply by James Dykstra on June 13, 2007 at 1:04pm

Hmm, I wouldn't be too concerned. The gist of Britannica's message seems to be that there's a lot of bad websites out there. Yup, that's true. There's also a lot of good ones. It's a teacher's job to help students find the good ones and discount the bad ones. The fact that there is more information available than there ever has been before is not bad if we teach the kids to sift carefully, to be skeptical about their sources, and to question, question, and question.

As I've heard said so often, teachers should just set students lose the Internet, they should be guiding them to good sources. In a similar vein, you wouldn't just set a Grade 5er lose in a big city's main public library because he'd get lost in the resources and be unable to figure out what's good. Teachers guide the students when they suggest good sites to the kids. I think we all do that fairly routinely.

Nothing new there.

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on June 13, 2007 at 3:28pm

Profound stuff here. Let's get onto it. I've gotten a lot of the links; it'd be good to get them all fired up. A worthy debate.
But all a really high-quality encyclopedia company has to do is launch into the new age. There's plenty of knowledge to sort out and go around.