Trick or Treat?

Happy Halloween! I’ve made a few small concessions to the holiday. One, I’m wearing my Edward Gorey tie. Two, after my afternoon class I’m taking an hour or so of vacation time to go home and carve a couple of pumpkins. Well actually a pumpkin and a gourd. It was a tough year for pumpkins. Hopefully, I’ll have some pumpkin photos to post tomorrow.

NPR’s Morning Edition had its fun with Halloween this morning too. They featured a predictable piece where they listed off how much money Americans are supposed to spend on the holiday. I guess they wanted to do something scary in honor of the holiday so they added on a sensational craptastic stinger to the piece. They said you might want to avoid Peeps marshmallow candies this year because this was the first year they were manufactured in China. Evidently a country of origin is enough to guarantee the candy is chocked full of poison. Are they made by a company that’s had safety issues in the past? Is it the only candy manufactured in China? Is it fear mongering for sensational effect? NPR didn’t bother to tell me. Take a listen, it truly awful “reporting.”

Final thought for the morning (I’m almost done with my cup of coffee). I saw this article yesterday that I find intriguing. Basically a college professor got tired of students using Wikipedia as a source for term papers and instead decided to make her students research and write a Wikipedia entry. The students had to write entries on globalization and sustainable development. Most of what the students submitted got edited out of Wikipedia. There has been some grumbling that forcing students to contribute will just serve to water down Wikipedia and writing a Wiki entry should not be substituted for the experience of writing and honest-to-god research paper. I believe the criticism is valid and mostly correct. I don’t see the benefit of Wikipedia defending itself from a couple of thousand entries rehashing Shakespeare ever few months. However, there is another dimension to the Wikipedia assignment.

As an undergraduate I hated course work. Not because it was hard or it was boring. What often bothered me was the effort I put into the project was only rewarded with a grade. Basically it’s a hoop you’re jumping through. After the professor took a cursory glance at the project it would be discarded and never looked at again. That’s hardly a motivational scenario. I like the aspect of creating something that might serve a purpose past the immediate need to secure a grade. I would like to think that a few of the students might have worked on their Wikipedia entries harder because they liked the idea that their contribution could endure. I also think it’s instructive that their work was edited out of Wikipedia if it didn’t meet that scholarly body of work’s lofty standards (sarcasm). It’s important to learn that effort does not necessarily equal quality.

Whoops, time to leave the building. It’s fire drill time.