Wiki Textbooks
I'd like to explore a new topic and that is the application of wiki software to custom published textbooks. I have really mixed views on this and hope that comments on my posts will help me figure things out. On the one hand is the exciting prospect of creating a working text for a course through the participation of students with their instructor. This enterprise is the ultimate in custom publishing. At the same time it firmly supports and extends constructivist models of teaching and learning. These models feature students as active learners constructing their own understandings through their self-regulated development of knowledge networks. These networks are built up from multiple modes and sources of information, though primary source texts may be conspicuously missing from the discourse. Further, the networks are mediated socially through interaction with peers, experts, and audiences as well as through observation and experience. Because they allow students to construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct knowledge networks, wikis give whole new meaning, and new scope, to the concept and value of student interaction with text.This can only be good, right? In addition to permitting global pedagogical nirvana, the process is a perfect reflection of technological potential in our promiscuous Information Age. It is also a reflection, I think, of post-postmodern sentiment, which seems to discard both idealism and realism in favor of interpretivism. In this view, both reality (metaphysics) and truth (epistemology) are separated from moorings of any kind and opened to a sea of equal opportunity interpretation. And what is a wiki if not a constantly changing seascape with dubious new creatures evolving among the more familiar organisms? Because a part of me says, no, there have to be baselines, there have to be standards, benchmarks, principles, authorities. There have to be limits, constraints, disciplines. There has to be quality control. Am I hopelessly old-fashioned? Am I favoring censorship? I'm going to answer my own questions (and you are welcome to answer them also), but first I want to actually read some wiki textbooks. (Maybe I'm just a tempest in a teapot.)
Labels: college textbooks, custom publishing, textbook authorship, Wikis
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home