Wikipedia U

Thomas Leitch is a professor of English and the director of the film studies program at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From "Gone with the Wind" to "The Passion of the Christ," also published by Johns Hopkins, and the coeditor of A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Battle of the Books1. Origin Stories2. Paradoxes of Authority3. The Case against Wikipedia4. Playing the Encylopedia Game5. Tommor and Tomorrow and TomorrowAppendix: Exercises for Exploring Wikipedia and AuthorityNotesIndex

In this thoughtful and thorough analysis, the author demonstrates how technology has complicated and enriched learning. This work is ideal for teachers, students, librarians, and would-be Wikipedia contributors. Library Journal This book is an excellent treatise on the controversy over authority and experience. Scholarly, written for an academic or more specialized audience, it is still accessible to the general reader, and well worth the effort... This important book is an essential discussion about how knowledge is disseminated and when it should be believed. -- Gretchen Wagner San Francisco Book Review In this deceptively slender volume, Leitch gathers a fascinating set of narratives around the nature of authority in the academic world... engaging and controversial... a critical (in several senses) debate about the very nature of authority and how it can, and must, evolve and be refined as both society and technology change around us. -- John Gilbey Times Higher Education Leitch's innovation is to spin the table in both directions: He uses the values of higher education to expose the contradictions of Wikipedia, but he just as deftly employs Wikipedia's ethos to expose the paradoxes of liberal education's own claims to authority. -- Timothy Messer-Kruse Chronicle of Higher Education This book considers the nature of knowledge, its authority, and its new challenges in the age of the internet, and considers its role behind liberal education processes as a whole. The result is a fine study that should be in any college-level collection. Midwest Book Review This book offers an engagine discussion of important questions of authority. Canadian Journal of Higher Education Wikipedia U is a useful handbook for teachers hoping to help students navigate information in our digital age. Pedagogy Leitch digs into this apparently straightforward contradiction to uncover any number of complications-he calls them paradoxes-of authority on both the online and liberal-education sides. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning