It was at this time that I introduced the idea of an open source text book. They seemed to understand the concept, but I has also introduced a number of new initiatives into the course, all focused on increased collaboration. We will see over the next few weeks how well they understood and how they get involved with the project and in particular, contribute to it.
Chris :-)
The plan for my text book is that my concept of an open source text is significantly larger than this project that I would like to implement. My definition should not be labelled open source, as initially it will not be modelled on the Open Source licensing for GNU license, but instead have the wiki open to users within the course (at present a class of face to face students and a class of online students).
Chris :-)
Comment by Ricardo Machado 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.
“I’ll Take Poor Assumptions for $800, Alex”
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 It takes a year and half for a textbook to get published, and by the time that happens it is outdated.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…
