Wiki Textbooks 5
The more research on wikis I do online, the more convinced I am about fundamental fallacies in the use of wiki-textbooks for content area learning. There is the question of standards of accuracy and veracity--editors can be anonymous or use fake names; one assistant professor even has his students VOTE on whether or not to accept edited content in their wiki textbook--and there is the question of the professoriate's role--the same assistant professor actually celebrates exchanging his role and status as an expert with that of gatekeeper! He has students write everything from the course syllabus to the exam questions (Heather Havenstein, Computerworld, 8/15/07, Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom; Stan Gibson, 11/20/06, Using a Wiki: A Textbook Case: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2061136,00.asp).
Even experts in IT, possibly the most relevant field for application, debunk wikis as just another form of groupware, prone to fall into disuse as burdens of information management displace knowledge creation (Steven J. Vaughan Nichols, 5/22/06, Wikis Are a Waste of Time: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965848,00.asp). Not to mention the potential for vandalism, e.g., the pre-calculus wiki-text containing ads for Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Propecia, Phenteramine, and auto insurance (http://pc40s.jot.com/WikiHome).
But I also see that this is not an all or nothing thing. There IS a place for wikis: providing contexts for skill development. By creating wiki-texts students can develop search skills (how and where to find out all you need to know), thinking skills (how to evaluate what you find and where you find it), judgment skills (how to choose what to include and exclude and what to believe as true), and organizational skills (how to structure and interrelate information from diverse sources). In this use, which is certainly very important, specific content areas are not needed; any topic will do--even, for example, umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html).
Thus, I think I would have a wiki-text project as a course supplement cum cooperative learning activity rather than as the primary vehicle for transmitting course content. If I were a modern history professor, for example, I might have students write one chapter on "between the wars" to show contributing causes of WWII. In this instance the wiki-text is restricted in scope and integrated around a particular (albeit complex) question and serves a particular instructional goal. I have to wonder, though, if I would have the time to manage the project.
On practicality, a high school history teacher (Clay Burell, 4/12/07 http://beyond-school.org/2007/04/12/update-on-the-broken-world-wiki-history-textbook-project/) had the following to say: "The wiki textbook project has not been difficult to manage at all, so far (but at the same time, it’s not a very student-centered project–the only choice students got was to choose which chapter of WWI to WWII history to turn into a textbook chapter). All students have drafted their re-write of the textbook chapter (paraphrasing skills, reading comprehension, writing), added multimedia (using del.icio.us searches, rss searches, etc–research skills), made a presentation (normally Powerpoint, but that’s fine, and they’re improving impressively at that, possibly because their slideshows are published for real audiences on the wiki), then given, with their partners, lectures to the class using their Powerpoints (speaking skills). I film the lectures, capture them in iMovie immediately after, and upload them to Google Video daily.
To keep the other students learning from these student-taught classes (rather than zoning out), they are quizzed each class on the content from the prior class’ lectures. (And yes, I do some post-mortem teacher lecturing after each student lecture to clarify points and model the “presentation as storytelling” approach I’m pushing them to learn. That is filmed and posted on the wiki too, which has interesting applications for semester exam reviews, next year’s classes, and general uses for world audiences as well.)
Finally, students self-assess their embedded lectures with a rubric my English dept colleagues made, and write goals for improvement for their follow-up lecture. They post these metacognitive skills-reflections on the discussion tab of their wiki page.
They’ll do the whole process again in a “Cold War” wiki textbook, and be graded for their lectures that time as an oral test grade (this first round is just a quiz grade for the lectures).
So the wiki textbook project is really traditional in terms of content, but offers a legacy product for future students with multimedia offerings a paper textbook obviously can’t offer.
Above all, my objectives for this project (like all my projects, really) are about literacy: reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching.
And collaborating."
Collaborating can be forced, however. I recently discovered a wiki tutorial on how to write a textbook. It has glaringly uneven topical development with many unpopulated sections. It was created by an IT prof. in the UK and guess whom he cites extensively on the subject of textbook authorship: ME! Thank you, but now I have to think about editing that wiki to accurately reflect what I actually say in my books and completely cover the topic!!! Maybe I should ask him if he would like to coauthor a book (a real one) with me.
Labels: custom publishing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, wiki-textbooks, Wikis
Wiki Textbooks 4
What Role for Instructors?
Wiki classrooms seem to turn instructors from imparters of knowledge into gatekeepers (and, necessarily, censors) in the global information network. Instructors provide the structure and tools for self-directed knowledge quests, and self-publishing professors and scholars help provide the theory and research that populate the web and constitute that knowledge. Potentially, everyone--and noone--is the expert. This raises an accountability issue.
For decades educators have been calling for nondidactic approaches to instruction, for instructors to be mentors and guides and sounding boards rather than "sage on the stage" lecturers. Now that the classroom is the Internet and the textbook is a class project, this change in job description is really happening for the first time. How does it sit with academics? Is it a relief or an imposition to not be accountable for what one knows or imparts to students? Are measures of teaching effectiveness to be reduced to classroom management skills?
I'm conflicted about this. On the one hand, I know that what I know is not a thing that I possess that I can just hand off to others. What I know is just as constructed from my thought and experience as students' knowledge is for them. The amount and quality of thought and experience is certainly different, however. How would that difference be reflected in a wiki classroom or a wiki textbook? When I try to imagine this, I see myself having to structure and direct investigations without imposing content. I see myself teaching critical thinking skills rather than my subject area. Wouldn't this make me more a technician than an expert or preferred knowledge source in my field? Is this to be the role of college instructors, and, if so, what outcomes might result in higher education?
I wish there would be some comments!
Labels: academic writing, custom textbooks, online textbooks, textbook writing, Wikis
Wiki Textbooks 3
How Will We Know What to Accept as True?
I suppose we can have confidence in the currency and accuracy of information in students' wikitexts to the extent that instructors serve as the final arbiters--and to the extent that the instructors themselves are credible as authorities in the subject. In this context a wiki textbook is a hermetic product, no different, really, from the unique pedagogical dynamics of the classroom in which a particular instructor and his or her students perform their rituals and epiphanies. But what about online textbooks produced this way that are thrown out to the world? What is the authorship? Can we have confidence that the content is correct and that the ethics of authorship are observed?
Conventionally, authors and publishers of textbooks are authoritative, identified, and accountable for documented content that is periodically revised. In a public wiki document, however, authors are anybody and content constantly changes. What is true one moment may be swept away the next--by anyone. What is seen as politically incorrect or unfavorable to any particular entity (such as a group or government or corporation) can be cleansed--anonymously, repeatedly. Vandalism and deliberate misinformation are commonplace. Content is supposed to be self-correcting, as self-appointed experts police entries until the truth is fleetingly achieved consensually.
There is a demonstration site by Jon Udell--very effective--that shows changes to a wikipedia entry over time using the electronic equivalent of time-lapse photography with voiceover. It shows the progressive development and correction of information about the use of umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html). The demo shows how corrupt entries are removed within seconds of appearing, how accuracy is continually honed through word substitutions, and how organization is gradually imposed on information after it appears--a breathtaking view of bottom-up processing at work. I think the demo is intended to inspire confidence in wikis as reliable sources of information, filtered as they are through a meta leveling mechanism: the online general public, which collectively knows what truth it wants.
I am not inspired to confidence, however. It scares me to death. The online general public has decided that we should learn and care about heavy metal bands and why they use umlauts in their names. The online general public also has decided that "Hitler-like," "Nazi-inspired" and "skinhead-related" are all too strong to explain the typographic preference for umlauts. They have decided on "Germanic" and "Gothic" but cite no etymologies, primary sources, or theories that might enlighten us on the first use of the umlaut in a band name and why it inspired such a raft of imitators. Is this truth as trivia? Democracy as tyranny?
Labels: academic writing, college textbooks, online textbooks, textbook writing, Wikis
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
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
