Textbook Authoring in the Digital Age--2
There is a whole new language for the teaching and learning enterprise today, and it is not textbook-based. The very word textbook has become vilified, vulgarized—a dirty word associated (rightly and wrongly) with the profit-taking and business practices of commercial higher education textbook publishers. Expository writing on a course subject for digitized delivery is not even called a textbook. Rather, the product is content—in the form of learning objects, modules, and media assets, offered in the form of an online course or a portal or gateway to new (or newly networked) knowledge. The term textbook will become obsolete or will be narrowly defined to refer only to conversions—non-interactive digitizations of textbooks in print.
Textbook authoring in the Digital Age thus requires a different way of looking at yourself, your mission, and the students. Today, as an erstwhile textbook author, you are regarded not as an instructor but as an SME (subject matter expert). SMEs provide authoritative content and sources, organized into templates that reflect principles of instructional design.
Principles of instructional design for online application have rules and conventions quite different in many ways from traditional lesson planning and pedagogy writing. Words, sentences, and paragraphs are adapted for readers who only skim or scan text, for example. Pedagogy becomes graphical and font-based navigational clues, hyperlink jumps, and concept webs. To set out scope and sequence, you write learning objectives keyed to telescoping outlines (rather than to fixed topical parameters). You create storyboards or content maps, gather and annotate instructional aids, and build networks.
As an SME, what you do is not instruction, however, which is regarded as linear and one-way, but rather conversation (nonlinear and two-way). You design conversations with students, who interact with you (and with each other) as often as you do with them. Students are collaborators in their learning (wikitexts are the ultimate expressions of this). Students also are consumers of the information conveyed in these conversations, information in packages and bits that students use to build and archive their own unique knowledge bases. Students will not be “responsible” for your information, only for their own learning, and they will choose what they will learn, based on the perceived personal or professional relevance and usefulness of that information to them at a given time.
Thus, for better and for worse, there is no canon—not any more. Rather than conveying a body of knowledge by writing a textbook, you are facilitating conversations that enable active (and interactive) elective learning. This learning is self- and socially constructed—the ultimate expression of the postmodern constructivist movement in educational philosophy—a movement buttressed by developments in psychometrics and educational psychology.
Your designed conversations with students may still include evidence-based narratives, but you will develop your manuscripts more like scripts—with settings, stage directions, and special effects in addition to players, speeches, and lines. As odd as it may seem compared to conventional textbook writing processes, screenwriting is appropriate for content that will be displayed on a screen. Your content will be displayed on computer monitors, laptops, PDAs, ebook readers, mobile phones, and any other so-called destructive technologies (so-called simply because they necessitate structural change) that the future holds.
If this sounds a bit like theatre—drawing in an audience to affect the way its members think and feel and potentially the way they act—I think this is accurate. Online instruction, like classroom instruction, is performative, a foundation of edutainment. As in theatre, audiences share or cohabit a cloud of both unreality and suspended disbelief. Witnessing, engaging, and participating is a form of play, a gaming process in which nothing is really certain. Things could go any which way, and I believe this, more transparently than in the past, is the true nature of future knowledge. Perhaps the permanent decline of textbook publishing, in addition to making us more prone to error and confusion, will also make us better actors, more honest and open-minded, with better scripts.
In screenwriting, your principal concern is not with students’ acquisition or mastery of a subject but rather with their experience as participants in a kind of theatre as well as their experience as self-directed consumers of information about your subject—much as they experience restaurant dining or marriage. Yes, I know this sounds a lot like marketing speak—inviting “consumers” to “join the conversation” and “share the experience” of learning, as if they were taking a taste test for Pepsi or Coke. Marketing and advertising jargon and habits of mind infiltrate every crevice of our existence. We live by capitalist precepts as subliminally and stubbornly as true believers do who attempt to live by their holy books. And with the power of a religion, those precepts preempt education along with other social institutions, recasting everything as business models.
I have come to understand that the marketing of information along with the permanent decline of textbook publishing is neither necessarily good nor necessarily bad; it’s merely different—not perverse but legitimately reflecting deep historical changes. There is no tragedy here, not yet, not compared to other changes educators have labeled tragic (or not) in retrospect. Meaningful learning and effective teaching will still take place, only by different names and in different forms, and humans will still inherit our evolutionary capacities for motivation, perception, cognition, communication, and so forth.
As Eugene Kim, media consultant, said about Wikipedia’s need for reform in August 2009, “There is a spirit and a culture that is starting to shift. That is a necessary thing. But the question is how do you scale [“scale” is marketing speak for “change”] without losing sight of your essence?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/media/ 31link.html?th&em) And that is my point exactly. How do text and academic authors in the Digital Age scale without losing sight of what they truly do?
I think you adapt to the changes, embrace the differences, and flourish through the practice of new ways of creating instructional narrative, context, and flow for online courses and new media. It’s exciting, and that, after all, is where the students are. Educators have always had to find students where they are.
Labels: college textbooks, constructivism, digital age, edutainment, instructional design, marketing of information, online courses, online textbooks, screenwriting, SME, textbook authoring
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
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
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 2
This is the second part of a series of posts on how to choose a textbook for a course, from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION
© Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
Matching You to the Textbook
The first question to ask when choosing a textbook is, what are you intending to do with it? And how does it fit with the way you teach? I used to tell state college students in Introduction to World History that their 2,400page twovolume textbook was just another perspective to compare with mine or to augment what I had to say in my lectures! Furthermore, exams would not draw directly from the text. The textbook was there primarily to keep me (and them) honest. I was appealing to their inherent need for perspective balance in any true intellectual inquiry. Hard to own such folly! But, okay, admit ityou’ve done this too. (And as they become more dependent on you and less inquiring, students start sharing or skipping the textbook.)
This model of instruction, by the way—“sage on the stage” lecturing to a largely passive audience—is passé with today’s enlightened instructional methods, which have finally filtered down (or up?) to higher education classrooms. Nevertheless, many instructors still choose slightly divergent textbooks that will allow students to question their learning or fill in the gaps, should they be motivated (miraculously) to do so. If this really is your goal in using a textbook, you probably should not teach introductory courses, because most beginners do not yet have the requisite attitudes and skills to use a textbook in this way. If you do teacher firsttier courses, reconsider your raison d’etre for textbook selection.
An alternative to choosing a textbook as an alter ego is to choose one for no other reason than that it covers course content far more comprehensively than you can or will in your classes. This textbook has it all, so that your digressions, rants, pet topics, areas of ignorance, and other inefficiencies or lapses do not necessarily compromise educational outcomes. Plus, you can use it to generate test items. I call this “covering” (as in “covering one’s ass”). Students, skipping classes, come to rely on this textbook (or its study guide) by default to acquire basic content, primarily in preparation for exams. If this is your intention, note that you cannot count on the college store to order the study guide without your say so; i.e., it would be inhumane to overlook it in the adoption process.
If you want complete control over student learning, are not concerned about “covering,” and write exams only from lectures, consider using a shadow text. This is a comprehensive outline of course content—à la Cliff Notes. Through instruction, you fill in the outline yourself for student consumption, and students study from their notes, referring to the outline only for the chronology of details. Note, however, that you need highly independent learners with good attendance to do this.
Using the textbook to teach is another matter. A textbook that teaches divides selected content into comparatively small and manageable chunks, has apparatus and pedagogy that guide readers through a learning process, and provides opportunities for selfassessment. This textbook is a tool for the student and is studentcentered. It places their learning above both you and the subject. As the textbook teaches, your role reverses somewhat, freeing you up to interact, elaborate, illustrate, facilitate, demonstrate, enchant—all the things that make the learning matter. This is harder, of course, so this choice is only for the good and the brave; but I believe it should be a mainstay of quality undergraduate education.
You may have other reasons for using (or not using) a textbook (even a good one) in your course. What are they?
Labels: choosing a textbook, college textbooks, course adoptions, evaluating textbooks
