Christopher Columbus

This Portrait was made by the Florentine painter Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (1483-1561). It was executed in the first half of the sixteenth century, after the death of Columbus. No portraits of Columbus during his life are known to exist.

Christopher Columbus
(1451 – 1506)
Navigator, colonizer, and explorer from Genoa, Italy, whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of the American continents in the Western Hemisphere.

Columbus made four voyages attempting, among other things to establish a settlement on the island of Hispaniola.

It is quite likely that Columbus introduced smallpox into the America, unknowingly, resulting in a loss of over 90% of the population of Eastern Woodland Indians and indigenous peoples of the Islands where he stopped enroute, by the time settlement began in earnest more than 100 years later.

The term "pre-Columbian" is usually used to refer to the peoples and cultures of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and his European successors.

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The Wikipedia Conundrum

Many a teacher today forbid their students from using Wikipedia, yet it is arguably the richest information resource of all time. An encyclopedia which draws on users to expand the bredth and depth of the information contained "within" it.

The arguement of those teachers may be that it is "unreliable" , a lazy man's refuge. Yet in the end, how is that different from any other works of humans? The very act of committing words to paper is an act fraught with the perils associated with the human condition. . . that each of us brings the perspectives and prejudices of his/her own arc of experience to the task of conveying a "truth" or a set of "truths".

The physicist Stephen Hawking, in a speech celebrating the new millenium at the Whitehouse said ". . . common sense is just another name for the prejudices that we have been brought up with."

Wikipedia is no more or less useful than any other resource but it does provide an effective launchpad for exploring almost any idea, event, person or theory.

To deny students access to the rich resources contained within Wikipedia is tantamount to denying them access to the wisdom of their elders or their teachers. Instead they must be taught to appreciate Wikipedia and to be aware of its limitations - as Ronald Reagan put it to "trust but verify". Reagan was speaking of the complexities of the US-Russian relationship, but he could very well have been speaking about the task of researching, or in an even broader sense the process of learning.

A good teacher need not fear Wikipedia, unless the depth of understanding that he or she themselves bring to their discipline and teaching is so shallow as to grant Wikipedia the power of absolute truth. A good teacher will use this resource as a means of stimulating students to seek out pathways to greater understanding, a solitary brainstorming session where ideas, links and resources lead us to drill deeper into the resources that lie beyond the gates of the wiki kingdom.