Your Name and Title:  Edward F. Gehringer, Associate Professor of Computer Science

School or Organization Name: North Carolina State University

Co-Presenter Name(s): (none)

Area of the World from Which You Will Present: United States

Language in Which You Will Present: English

Target Audience(s): Educators, instructional technologists

Short session description:  The advantages of student-authored textbooks, our results, and our specialized software support.

Full session description:

As wiki usage becomes common in educational settings, instructors are beginning to experiment with student-authored wiki textbooks.  Instead of reading textbooks selected by the instructor, students are challenged to read the primary literature and organize it for consumption by the other members of the class.  This has important pedagogical advantages, as students are stimulated to take responsibility for their own learning and perform tasks similar to those in the real world.  These benefits, however, come with an array of administrative challenges, including sequencing the material to be covered, and assigning other students to peer-review the submitted work.  This presentation discusses our experience with the process and its software support in two distance-ed courses, one on parallel computer architecture, and the other on object-oriented software design.

            The software is the Expertiza system, which allows peers to review each other’s work, permitting the author and reviewer to communicate in double-blind fashion. Authors are encouraged to revise their work in response to reviewer comments.  Reviewers can be rated by the authors they review, as well as by third-party metareviewers.  Students select topics through the system, and the system reminds reviewers to submit their reviews at the proper time. This greatly decreases the overhead of managing large writing projects.

            In our two semesters of use, 135 students wrote on about 50 topics.  They reported that the process gave them new insight into the topic they were writing on (4.2 on a scale of 1 to 5), that they put a lot of effort into their writing (4.2) and that they were proud of their work (4.1).  They were somewhat less positive on the credibility of their chapters (3.8) and the usefulness of the reviews (3.4), but their reaction was not negative on any aspect of the process.

             We believe our experience is of special interest to global educators. Too often, distance-ed courses have few interactions between instructor and student, and almost none among students themselves. Message boards don't solve the problem, since students often don't read what others have posted before responding themselves. By contrast, students who are reviewing each other's textbook articles know exactly what they need to respond to. Authors have an incentive to interact with their readers to know how to improve their work. The instructor can use student feedback in evaluating each student's contribution. The result is much richer interaction between students, and a better final product.

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  • Thanks for your submission to present at the 2011 Global Education Conference. Your proposal looks promising, but could benefit from some additional language that ties your work to the conference theme of global collaboration. Your proposed session may imply global collaborations and connections, but we need to see more explanation of how your work ties into our mission. The conference seeks to present ideas, examples and initiatives related to connecting educators and classrooms around the world with an emphasis on promoting global awareness and instilling global competency in students. This is not a general education conference nor a technology conference. Please review your submission and adjust accordingly, so that participants clearly understand how your work fits into the mission of the conference.
    • The initial idea behind the Expertiza project was to facilitate creation of student-generated content.  One of our current collaborations is with the STEMWiki project.  We are working with them to develop software support for their writing projects.  The idea behind STEMwiki is "to demonstrate efficacy of the Dynamic Textbook Project, which is a multi-institutional collaborative venture to develop the next generation of open-access textbooks to improve STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) at all levels of higher learning. The central aim of the Dynamic Textbook Project is to develop and disseminate free, virtual, customizable textbooks that will substitute for current, commercial paper texts in multiple courses at post-secondary institutions."  Textbooks like this are especially needed in poorer countries, where the cost of commercial books is prohibitive.
  • Is this a commercial presentation?
    • No.  Our software is open source, freely available to all.
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