Week 8- Article Review #2

Overview

I read A Technological Reinvention of the Textbook: A Wikibooks Project.

This was an amazing article about a university who is doing what I wish every school would do: using technology to enhance their class. There is a teacher preparation program at the Old Dominion University in Norfolk Virginia. In one of the classes in that program, the professor started a project where the students would write their own textbook on a wiki.

The article opens by telling us what is wrong with the traditional textbook model: outdated information, limitation of perspective, they are a passive medium, and their limitations. It goes on to say that the time it takes to research, edit and publish a textbook means that some of them are outdated even before they hit the shelves. ODU attempted to solve these issues by having the 300 students in a Cultural Foundations of Education course write their own textbook. In doing so they researched online, read sections of many other textbooks, conducted interviews, made videos, and anything else that they thought should be included to enhance the information.

Throughout the process, this project has changed to address concerns, adding a peer review portion, and incorporating exemplars from previous semesters. Public policy students at the college have even conducted surveys between this course and other courses that use a textbook and found that students who write their own do “at least as well” as those who read a traditional textbook.


The wikibooks idea is becoming very popular as many educators begins to ask questions surrounding students writing their own textbooks:
Should they?
Can they?

Relate to Course Objectives

This course has many goals and objectives. It attempts to teach us how to use technology effectively and how to utilize it in the classroom. It also educates us about digital citizenship, using technology to teach cultural awareness, how to respond to the ever changing world of the web. One of the biggest things that it teaches is to shift our thinking. Most students enter the classroom thinking that you can add technology to your lesson plan. This class teaches a shift in thinking so that you leave thinking about the world as your classroom and that the technology is your lesson plan.

How does this impact my teaching?
I think that at the high school level, this might be difficult to do. The scope and depth of a project required to a textbook mixed with the smaller class sizes make it less of a reality. But I do think that there is potential to change how we use textbooks in the classroom. I have never been a fan of textbooks and have often made the case that the information is so outdated they are of little use in a business classroom. While my students may not be able to completely create their own textbook, this article really got me thinking about how I can shift their attention to online tools, and how I can have them create their own products instead of reading the thoughts of others.

Reflection

One of the things that the article says is that as the world changes “it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for then to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information.” This is one of the many things that we have been discussing in our class. Our students aren’t prepared for the real world, and our reliance on the old teaching model and textbooks may be a big part of that.

The wikibooks project was also another idea for a project to do in my classes. I love projects, and the idea of my class being project-centered. While I may not have enough time to create a whole textbook with my students, I love the idea of having them create their own guides or crib sheets of information instead of reading it from a book.