Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Gombe, Nigeria
The twenty-first century has brought about the proliferation of technology resulting in a paradigm shift from the traditional education – teaching and learning process within the four walls of a classroom – to an information and communication technology (ICT) driven process. This demands a new set of skills and competence for maximizing teaching and learning. The ubiquity of information-driven by this information and communication technology brought about an information and knowledge explosion.
The twenty-first-century education is not merely teaching and learning – memorization – but building skills and competencies like critical thinking, communication, collaborative skills, innovative and media and information literacy skills for teachers (capacity building) and students to mount the challenges and embrace opportunities occasioned by today’s world.
In Nigeria, governments at all levels have formulated policies and invested in programmes aimed at deepening the integration of ICTs in all sectors of the country. However, in the area of Media and Information Literacy (MIL) little or no efforts have been recorded for its integration into the nation’s education system.
The Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom program in Gombe State, will go a long way in addressing these skills gaps and building teachers’ capacity in the area of twenty-first-century skills by leveraging Wikipedia as an Open Education Resource based on the UNESCO Media and information literacy (MIL) framework. This curriculum has a lot of promise for teachers in the country to learn twenty-first-century abilities and then pass those skills – critical thinking, digital literacy, information access, retrieval, evaluation and synthesis (new body of knowledge) through digital technologies – on to their students which will lead to an information and media literate society.