So I’m looking at pretty bleak odds right now in terms of getting home from beautiful Monterey (where I got the experience of presenting on the TED stage even though it wan’t the TED conference) because there is this big blob of icy snow blue over New Jersey on the weather maps today. But this article about a Boston College professor who is using wikis to have students create the text for his course lifted my spirits a bit. Lots of shifts:
“My wiki is my textbook now,” he said. “This platform is infinitely better and gets better information from a variety of sources. It takes a year and half for a textbook to get published, and by the time that happens it is outdated. [The use of] textbooks will begin to fade … and these more collaborative-based, environment will probably rise to the surface.”
But here is the chuckle. In the comments on the story, we quickly get the typical skeptic:
What exactly are the students (or their parents) paying for, and what exactly do the students know at the end of the course that they didn’t know before? Or does everybody just get a nice fuzzy feeling because they create their own exams and determine their own grades? And how many credits do they get for this waste of time and money?
And, in an example of what fun all of this is, a student from the class gives a great response starting with “I’ll take poor assumptions for $800, Alex”. Nice.
Maybe my assumptions about the weather are wrong too…
Technorati Tags: wikis classroom education shifts
“I’ll take poor assumptions for $800, Alex†is from the movie ‘Finding Forrester. Great film.
Love the student response. Obviously the person asking those questions never went to college or has forgotten what it was like. I am embarrassed by the education I got in college because it did not prepare me at all for my career in education and I absolutely wasted every dime I spent on textbooks. Not only were they rarely used, but also usually out of date. Maybe they should have linked to A Vision of Students Today.
Having never enjoyed attending school, I received a 4 year degree in education while never reading a textbook. What does that say for the secondary education system in our country? We need more courses that push the boundaries and reform the system. Too many educators are comfortably numb when it comes to reform in education.
Will,
Hope you made it back OK from Monterey. All from my district who attended the conference certainly learned and were inspired by your keynote. We are all ready to try “open phone tests” as well as many other things as we take your advice to expand our horizons for our students. Didn’t realize that was the TED stage – nice job!
I like the idea of using the wiki as a textbook. Right now my students are using it to create a review of information that has already been covered but after reading this I think their third semester wiki will be their own textbook. My students love their wikis now. They have definitely surpassed my expectations. I can’t wait to see what they will come up with when they are making their own textbooks.
Wow, I feel like I am catching up on this stuff. How wild you posted textbook rethinking. I also got the same comment on my blog about the standardization effect. How will a teacher measure the student progress/comprehension if every student is all over the place with content?
There is an answer. The students do like we are in blogging. Monitor progress through interactive media and projects and the teacher can view the work online or on a “learning blog.” Is that a method for this type of new learning? Or am I off base?
Wow Will, I’m so glad you wrote this post! I was inspired by you this summer at the November Learning Workshop in NH and I even presented Wikis That Work (http://wikisthatwork.wetpaint.com/) at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference (http://www.nhcmtc.org/) with much inspiration by you! I believe that we can create our own textbooks using wikis and our students can be just as inspired by having a say in their education. I also loved reading about The Global Text Project (http://globaltext.org/), which was born because of a professor using wikis in the classroom…remarkable!
To answer the critic’s question, students receive 3 credits for this course which is called Computers in Management – this class is required of all students in the Carroll School of Management.
As a graduate of Lausanne Collegiate School (I heard you speak at the 2007 Laptop Institute this summer and have read your blog ever since) and a freshman at Boston College, I was excited to hear you talk about this innovative style of teaching. Throughout my high school career at Lausanne my classes were constantly changing to accommodate for new and different technology; and while some of it worked and some of it didn’t, it was definitely understood that learning was not typical at my school. I knew leaving Lausanne I would be hard-pressed to find an institution as open to technology as Lausanne.
In my experience with Wikis, they are actually drastically more helpful than textbooks in many regards because they encourage students to actively put forth effort for learning. A teacher can ask you to read but that responsibility lies with you – you can either read or not. But when your entire grade and your learning experience revolves around a constantly-changing ‘book’ of personal opinions mixed with fact and analysis, you are forced to take a deeper look into the fundamentals of the subject you are studying and therefore more likely to throw in your two cents when you see a topic that interests you. Any teacher can tell you that a class room is always more lively when students are participating in discussion, but the opposite is true when students are reading from the book. In a world where technology is replacing books and hard-copy paper mediums, teachers need to compete to hold the interest of their students. I cannot think of a better way to do that while still keeping in touch with the idea of a techbook than to create a Wiki.
I hope that more professors begin to examine this style of teaching and classroom involvement. It would be great to see a Wiki used in a science course here.
http://edumorphing.blogspot.com/2007/12/rethinking-textbook.html
My question for my own class-created wiki textbook from last year is, what to do with it now?
I’d say more, if comments became conversations here.