(via Leigh Blackall) So here’s an interesting idea from Teemu Arena:
I go on and suggest a new school book paradigm. Turn everything around.
Write a school book that has purposefully inserted factual errors. Make it as uncertain as possible, so that the student needs to seek conversations to make any sense out of it.Make the point of the course to discuss the book and what things are actually true and what are not. Base that on conversations reaching to other information sources and people for answers outside the course as well. Help them to be curious to seek different points of view. Make critical peer review and discussion the central process. Make them realize that to cope with untruths they need humble conversations rather than forcing their own beliefs.
So I know this is a “doh” moment, but it strikes me that one of the points of blogging is to engage in those “humble conversations” in which we try to socially negotiate truth. We’re not purposely writing untruths, but we’re writing “yet-to-be-discovered truths” which necessitate a different type of reading, one that requires the critical thinking and information literacy skills that a book of errors would demand.
Interesting way of framing it, I think…
And this is the real beauty of Wikipedia in schools, whether or not it’s more accurate than Encarta or Britannica.
My classes know what wikis are as they’ll have built up some small ones together inside Moodle, and thus have some handle on the wisdom of crowds, but the first time we do research with Wikipedia, I show them how easy it is to edit an entry and type in information that is plainly wrong; I’ve not dared to save these yet, but I’m sure they’d get edited out anyhow. They soon get the idea that they need to reflect far more carefully and bring those discernment and evaulation skills into play, and thus Internet research is no longer a matter of cut and paste.
At the risk of babbling…
I can’t help but think that as long as were still talking about ‘truth’ and ‘untruth’ that the most important point is still being missed. “yet to be discovered truths” encourages the belief that a ‘truth’ is the goal of any intellectual endeavour… That kind of dichotomy often creates the kind of polarization that kills dialogue…
Forcing people to think about their ‘beliefs’ is about forcing them to consider other people’s beliefs as valid… not as true or false…
Hi,
I like the idea – it is just not my idea. I did not even write the post. Another Teemu, Teemu Arena, wrote the post to the Flosse Posse group blog.
So, here we are: Having a conversation to fix errors that happens so easily in the fast, non-reviewed, global, multi-cultural, multi-lingual network.
Dave…that is a great point. I think what I meant to imply is that there are no truths as we used to associate them. We used to think what we read in a book is true. Now we understand that by way of the conversation, there is no such end result. Not sure that makes sense, but I think we agree.
And Teemu, my apologies. I just took Leigh’s link and just assumed which, as we all know, is not very good practice these days. The good news is that you could and did clarify it, and I’ve since fixed the post. Thanks.
Several of my science teachers did a variation of this in their classes. It started when one of them posted this thoughton their blog (part of our staff development). After some discussion, they developed a review assignment for a test (I suggested a wiki, but they chose paper) that was full of factual errors. The students then had to go through in small groups and figure out which parts were correct and which parts were incorrect. It generated some interesting discussions among the students and the teachers felt like the students were much more engaged than in a typical review.
Some of the teachers were upfront about the mistakes, but at least one teacher handed it out and started going through it just to see how long it would take for the students to notice mistakes and say something. It only took a couple of minutes, but he was beginning to wonder if they were ever going to say anything.