Well, looks like at least one educator has taken to using wikis in lieu of traditional textbooks! (See Wes Fryer’s Infinite Thinking Machine post on this very idea.) According to Computerworld, Gerald Kane, assistant professor of Information Systems at Boston College is encouraging his students to use a wiki site to confer and collaborate. Students also use the wiki to propose potential examination questions, some of which end up on actual tests! According to Kane, the practice of using student authored questions has worked out well, because students have more of a sense of what will be on the exam. I wonder if he had to provide students with some basic test and measurement guidelines before he started receiving questions that merited inclusion on his tests? Having done so, I would imagine an increased level of student engagement and buy in regarding the course as a whole, and I’ll look into incorporating this practice in my Contemporary Humanities course this fall.
I can truly relate to Kane’s sentiments regarding the shift in teaching style that takes place once wikis are brought into the classroom. In the article, he states that the wiki “has become a really robust tool and has changed the way I teach, primarily because it means I am more of a guide to them rather than a lecturer. My job is to teach them how to navigate this information on the Web. The wiki is now the basis and the platform on which my class is based.” I spoke to my middle school students about this very idea today by explaining to them that my job is to teach them how to use the tools that will engage and excite them about knowledge acquisition. This, in contrast to the standard “sit there and let me tell you what you need to know” approach. Boring!
Active Knowledge Transfer and Collaboration
Students are also using the wiki space to provide each other with proofreading assistance – offering each other useful editing suggestions prior to turning in their work. Gates states that his review of those papers receiving peer editing help versus those not relieving it showed that the peer edited efforts typically garner higher grades. I was the resident “paper editor” for my dorm floor fresman year. While it provided me with a little pocket change — yes, I charged for my services — it sure would have been easier to ditch the hard copies for easily editable electronic versions! I imagine that students also benefit greatly from higher caliber work examples posted on the wiki site by more advanced researchers and writers in the class.
Something John Pederson mentioned the other day via one of his copious and very entertaining twitters (keep ‘em coming, John!) that wikis work so well for eduction because they allow for Just In Time (JIT) editing. While I share John’s impression that this feature also eggs on professor OCD tendencies, I can imagine no better way to relay current information to my students. The typical textbook takes two years to go from the draft to general readership stage. This fact alone makes the benefits of using wikis in the classroom crystal clear.
Technorati Tags: textbooks, wikis, school reform
