By Sana Raza
Your parents might remember that whenever they had something to research on or to understand some topic they would have to go to a library and open up, old huge textbooks, or more likely an encyclopedia to obtain all the facts they needed. Nowadays that is definitely not the case! Why open a textbook when you can easily use the internet and find out whatever you need in just a few minutes by using the specific terminology in the search engine? Usually the first website with the information you’re looking for that pops up on your search result is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia can be considered your own online encyclopedia, but the beauty of this encyclopedia is that anyone on the net can edit it; information is edited by the people, for the people until it is deemed to be mostly accurate. Though when this project was initiated by Ward Cunningham in 1995 no one thought that this project would become so well known. When Wikipedia was initiated the creators wanted to create a place where different writers would be able to contribute and share without any hurdles. Wikipedia’s reliability and style has drawn a lot of attention from the academics. Students now a day’s prefer the use of Wikibooks or other technological resources for learning instead of opening up their textbooks. Persichite, Caffarella & Tharp (1999) discussed the effective modeling of technology, their point of view was that for technology addition in learning to be flourishing for the teachers it is important that they provide students with basic effective modeling.
In some researches it was seen that students learn better online compared to textbooks that are provided in the classroom, it has also been seen the use of technological resources in introductory classes have helped in enhancing students performance in later higher level professional courses and has facilitated them. In the western educational sector the majority of students indicated that Wikibook did a better job compared to traditional textbooks.
In our educational sector the usage of technological resources such as Wikibooks should be more commonly used. This will help save time of the students, and help students here keep up with the rest of the world. Learning will be a fun and much more inspiring using the net which in turn will play a role in our retaining knowledge.
Think, Analyze & Share 
Wikibooks in general have innumerable advantages i.e. the one advantage for those that require reading glasses is the adjustable text, i.e. the ability to enlarge and shrink text as needed by the user Another benefit would be that “many e-books include different multimedia effects, such as written text, oral reading, oral discourse, animations, music and sound effects. This creates interactivity between the user and the book.
The wikibooks have many advantages although there are still a few deficiencies and vulnerabilities. There is a restriction on electronic equipment, internet reliability, fragment reading, compatibility of software, and the initial cost. Other disadvantages are navigation implications on an e-book device and unreliable life span in terms of long term digital storage. The very NEGATIVE thing which I found about Wikibooks is that everyone can edit and change information accordingly. This information can be wrong or miswritten. The person who is exploring the topic very first, there is probability that he would have got that wrong or mis written information. So, there is no reliability or validity in Wikibooks.
Wikibooks are more fruitful because there is more content in wikibooks like videos, images and animations make wikibooks are easy to read as sometimes wording in books are difficult but in wikibooks we can understand seeing through pictures and videos. Wikibooks are time saving because we can read more than one book at a time and there is lot of information and also easy to use and search. We can also use wikibooks anywhere and anytime through our cell phones and ipads. We can also explore a lot of other books or informative sites. By using wikibooks there is no need to buy a book only for one topic and also no need to wait for new addition or search for specific publisher.
If we think about the implementation of Wikibooks in instruction, then how far would you expect from students to find out a particular information from this immense medium of online encyclopedia? How would you incorporate it in teaching? Many feasibility issues would be there.
It is so far the best informational website ever made but why can we not give reference of these Wikibooks when we are writing a literary (scholarly) research work? Yes, one can edit it but this makes the whole information doubtful sometimes, the thing left would be to match this information with other websites for confirmation. Then, why not one should prefer those other website at the first place?
The good thing which I found is that they give references at the end, If we search those references on internet it will serve the whole purpose of validity and will enhance the understanding of the information.
Wikipedia is everywhere, most of us prefer going for online books but one can not disagree with the fact that a book has its own taste, the knowlegde we get from a book if different from online ones. Today we hardly see anyone using a book for the sake of knowledge, everyone is so busy these days that it seems a huge task to open a book then search for difficult meanings from dictionary so we prefer learning online but hwat we dont realize is a book can tell us so much more that we miss when we srudy online
i personally dont like to read from wikibooks…
think for a second, how many hours can you sit near your PC or laptop to read a book..??
1?? 2?? or more??
i don’t think so you can sit for hours in a single pose.
one need to feel comfortable while reading from book…
i am not discouraging the fact that wikibooks can considered as a big advantage, but on the other hand, studying from wiki book which can be edited at any time can not be a good idea as your not sure about the content of the book to be true or not.
whereas in case of a textbook, you can handle it and read it in any posture you like.
plus, using to much laptop or PC can damage one’s eyes too, so it is not good as health is concern….
so me, TEXTBOOKS are a better option…. 🙂
I agree with what you have said, text book are way better than E-books , indeed they are a better option :p
but right now we see more and more people choose E-books,since it can save their time and money.Reading from a computer lacks the knowledge as well as comfort of reading from a book. Plus Screen glare and eyestrain can become problem for some E-book learners. Ofcourse there are many advantages of learning online but online books can not take place of text books. We cant just leave them totally..
Text books and e-boooks have their own postive effects and draw backs. if you developed your habit rading text books i think you will not feel very comfortable if you were asked to read the e-books. There is also a possiblity of eye side weakness and today’s big problem with the pakistani students is that they do not have access to the good books for university level in shape of text books they are very costly but we can access thoses books on internet. we are living in duality of our educational dependency one is e-books second is text books i think they way technology is going on in future we will built e-book labs rather than building libraries.
no one can deny the fact that wikibooks and other articles on the site help immensely in gaining knowledge and information for your upcoming assignment or quiz, we can look up the meaning of anyword, just in seconds, whereas in the past, we had to use dictionaries, the search engines and wikibooks gives us advantage that we can not only see the meaning of the word, but we also can get other information too, like where it can be used. this is just about the words, we can search about anything and the whole lot of information will pop in front of eyes, but i have my doubts on the authenticity of the facts given on the wikibooks, because any one can edit those so there is a big issue of reliability.