Wiki Textbooks 2
Well, now that I've had a chance to survey briefly some wiki textbooks online, I see some clear pedagogical benefits relating to the instructional models I mentioned in my last post. The students are forced to survey a variety of information sources in order to construct text, which means more reading and writing and further development of literacy and thinking skills. In most cases the instructors structure the wiki text in some way, by providing a detailed table of contents, for example, to show the sequence of conceptual and factual categories of information that students should fill. Some instructors further structure the collective textbook writing project by assigning individual students particular topics and particular roles in the creative process. Student A might have to write an explanation of hybrid vigor, Student B might then have to provide examples of it, Student C might have to peer review or fact check the piece prior to publication, and Student D might have to be responsible for monitoring and editing subsequent changes to the entry. I thought this was a good use of the medium. It also points out other clear pedagogical benefits relating to social interaction and peer-mediated learning. El-hi education literature has promoted cooperative learning since the 1960s--along with discovery learning, active learning, self-regulated learning, authentic (contextualized or situation-driven) learning, and technology-mediated learning. It's interesting to see these models actualized in higher education today through dramatic applications of the wiki software.I say dramatic because I think the changes are and will be profound. They will affect what we know and what we think we know, how we talk about things, what we regard as important, who we regard as an authority or an expert. Standards will fall left and right (starting with grammar and punctuation--e.g., how I resent public disregard for the proper use of apostrophes). Talk about dumbing down! And the changes will be mind-bending as well. We will learn (if we haven't already) to accept reality as an illusory, factuality as relative, truth as interpretation, uncertainty as normal chaos. Meanwhile, however, I now really want to co-write a wiki text!
I keep thinking of students in a summer course I taught at a state college on U.S. History and Constitutional Government, 1865 to the Present. I was an anthropologist, assigned out-of-field, and had successfully taught a few semesters of world history. With my Henry Steele Commager and various other hastily compiled texts, I managed to stay slightly ahead of my students, who, alarmingly, proved to be high school history teachers taking summer courses for advancement! I.e., they undoubtedly knew more than I did on the subject. We met once a week for 3 hours--a lot of time in which to screw up. I studied day and night and took a tutorial on constitutional law (way more complex than I had imagined), but I was still worried about the 3 hours. About halfway through the course I asked the students to team up and take particular constitutional issues that interested them to report on. To my astonishment, they flat-out refused! One explained, "We know what group work is; we assign it to our students all the time. But we didn't pay money here to do the work ourselves. We paid money to learn what you have to teach us that we can bring back to the classroom."
So I guess those students would not have co-written a wiki textbook with me. Maybe undergraduates don't notice (or care) that with wikis they do the work themselves. Which leads me to the questions, How will be know what to accept as true? and, What will be the role of the wikitext instructor?
Labels: custom publishing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, textbook authorship, textbook writing, Wikis
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home