Peering in the Classroom of Tomorrow:

A look into what mass collaboration in education could be.

Everyone has something to teach, something to offer that is unique to their experiences or the result of their own personal analysis. Though the teacher standing in front of your class may very well be highly qualified to teach the subject at hand, they are most certainly not the only ones. It shouldn't be "one teacher, one class", it should be a hundrend or a thousand! Schools should follow MIT's innovation and post full curriculums online (class syllabus, texts, homework assignments, ect...); but this time allow any who wish to participate in exapanding or editing the syllabus.

Wikis for Teachers

Wiki's have the potential to revolutionize teaching. In most jurisdictions and institutions, the curriculum is developed in a bubble - each teacher typically develops most of their material alone or in a department - an enormous amount of duplication when you think that all schools or colleges are teaching pretty much the same topics. Some schools and teachers have begun sharing material on the web and on an intranet, but it is not at all widespread. To date, the most common repository for the curriculum is a file cabinet in the teachers classroom. New teachers do not have access to any of this material (unless the school has a good mentoring program). Often, bringing about a "sink or swim" process throughout the early years of a new teachers career. Many have speculated that this approach has led to the drastic shortage in new qualified teachers. The problem itself becomes compounded very frequently as most teachers handle multiple subjects and some at different grade levels. A wiki that can serve as a large database a of freely available lesson plans, tests, quizzes, and best practices on covering the state standards could be enormously beneficial for new teachers.

The same problem is mirrored in textbook and workbook creation.

At the primary and secondary level, typically, teachers are using textbooks that are developed locally or regionally. Creating a textbook requires lengthy research, vetting, and continuous updating. Oftentimes teachers are forced to create their own material until the "latest version" is released. Even then it may not fit the teacher's needs and is then sidelined. A wiki has the potential to bring the development process of these resources to them on a personal level. The textbook publishers can host their information in a wiki, allowing teachers to pick and choose what they need (rather than the other way around). Teachers can also become a part of the development process by continuously adding information, filling in gaps, building information about regional topics, and fixing the errors of the publishers. Not only could this greatly enhance the teachers ability to provide high quality lesson plans, but it could also help the schools to reduce their dependence on large distributions of new textbooks (teachers could print or project the page rather than use a textbook). Buying new textbooks is a costly process that prevents the schools from spending money on other programs.

• Of course, the teachers could just build this themselves and then sideline the publishers altogether. Bringing free knowledge to the world and immensely improving our public education system.
• California Open Source Textbook Project - a case study of how children's textbooks can be written in a wiki.

Teachers as facilitators rather than instructors

Collaboration allows for student to student P2P education in a way that breaks out of the boundaries of the classroom. Mike Jones, a college professor, now uses wikis in all of his classes to allow students to teach each other. His research in using wikis for the classroom was sponsored by Sheridan College's Professional Development Institute in Toronto. He is developing best practices on how to organize, develop materials, teach, and evaluate within a wiki. One of the important discoveries was how collaborative wiki-based learning built on practical abilities in ways that than traditionally passive instructing doesn't. Whereas in textbook based learning the activity focus is to get students to remember, understand and apply knowledge, collabrative learning encourages them to analyze, evaluate, and create.

Education (refactored from wikinomics beyond business)

In the introduction to Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams reference the hierarchical nature of corporations throughout history. The modern school classroom that evolved in the 19th and 20th centuries is no different--a group of subordinate students presided over by a teacher, who in turn reports to a principal, a superintendent, a school board, etc. Collaboration occurs, but has been generally limited to small groups of students for "projects" or localized collaboration among teachers and administrators.

In addition to that, Michael Furdyk of TakingITGlobal, states that lack of engaging content is a significant issue facing American public education (Tapscott and Williams, 2006, p. 51). The prevalence of interactive online spaces, sites, and tools are very attractive, energizing, and simply more engaging to students than humdrum drill/kill activities found in the typical classroom. Collaboration, often missing in the classroom, is readily available online.

There is a also a strong, attractive element of social construction inherent in these interactive spaces, sites, and tools. Berger and Luckman (1966) outlined a process in which knowledge is socially constructed over time by an ever growing group of like-minded individuals with similar interests. As their conception of knowledge gains traction, this new knowledge, created by a network of collaborating individuals, will in time become the new paradigm. Linus Torvalds, of Linux fame, may not have heard of social construction, but alludes to: "People just self-select to do projects where they have expertise and interest." (Tapscott and Williams, 2006, p.69)

One way to harness this nexus of cooperation, collaboration, and socially constructed knowledge in the classroom is through the blog--a tool which allows teachers to share ideas, strategies, and curriculum across geographical boundaries with inexpensive ease. Students' blogs provide a larger authentic audience for writing and exploration of ideas than the lone teacher grading class papers. It opens the door to peer review and learning as well as learning from the entire on-line community. Educators and learners can blog with experts in the field, giving the experts a chance to share their thoughts and experiences and also turning the experts into learners as well. The reverse-chronology format of blog posts is ideal for students detailing progress on an assigned project. While many school systems may be skeptical of Myspace; to the extent that it has been banned at several campuses, entrepreneurial teachers use it as an efficient means of mass-communication with the next generation of students, for whom email is passe.

Google Docs and other online word processing applications hold potential for collaboration between teacher and student. Papers become "living" documents, where revisions are easily observed and recorded, and comments can be attached in-text. Multiple users can be brought in simply to view and comment on a document, or actually contribute to it and revise it. A class, a school, or several schools can all collaborate to create expansive works ranging from science manuals, literary criticism, historical analysis, or anything else that would be far less likely a product of one or two students and teachers.

Wikis make collaborative curriculum development possible. For example, to draft next year's course syllabus, professors, researchers and faculty subject experts can begin by setting basic course scope, key works and theories to learn and discuss. Students, with this introductory framework in mind, can modify the syllabus wiki with lesson ideas and their own knowledge of readings and related subjects that will make the course more inviting. In upper years of many disciplines, it may be possible for accomplished students with subject depth to codesign discussion seminars and even volunteer themselves to involve their area of expertise in teaching the class (and the professor). Students enhance the overall learning experience by enriching class content with unique sets of knowledge. Without a wiki, the professor and other students might never leverage the 'learning multiplier' of a dozen different study foci. The wiki can yield a living, breathing syllabus that changes one-minded, self-directed study into peer-developed, interdisciplinary learning opportunities.

Effects on Education Systems

The widespread availability of information will ensure the extinction of the university or schooling system in its present form. It will be difficult to maintain knowledge monopolies, and restrictions to access as the knowledge in the commons grows and more information is created in the commons than in restricted domains. Competitive advantage will depend upon the rate of generation of information rather than the information itself because of massively parallel discovery and rapid diffusion of information. The competitive advantage of societies may depend purely on how fast they are able to adapt their education systems to give individuals access to ever more information over shorter time scales, e.g., giving a high school graduate the same capabilities as a doctoral candidate. How do you compress the time it takes to learn? Unified notation is one side of it -- but there are several other factors: individual concentration and attention span appear to be the most important. Thus, systems that teach students to increase their powers of concentration the fastest will probably live longer than others. This calls for enormous experimentation which is not possible within the context of a bureaucratically controlled system of indoctrination that schooling generally is in today's world. This experimentation is more likely to take place where there is more private schooling or schooling controlled by the parents of the children. Examples are shoestring private schools in places like Nigeria or India. Under these conditions, knowledge of context will permit design of better educational experiments. And those experimental results that are universally applicable will be quickly adopted or used around the world (e.g., the Kumon system of mathematics training, or courses from 'The Teaching Company').

Indeed, many universities see this coming, and are offering remote classes, putting up course materials for sale on the web, and even opening up their classroom instruction to the world. Students today are not looking for information alone--they also look for the much faster acquisition of knowledge that is possible through face-to-face interaction in an academic community, and for the reputation bestowed by a degree from a reputed university. But the competitive value of these factors continues to reduce except in R&D because of the increase of bandwidth in communications. If you could interact with someone remotely on a 10 GHz link, true to smell, taste, sight, feeling and hearing, then it could very well substitute for a good classroom. The comparative advantage of expensive universities will continue to fall as online systems demonstrate the training of more and more capabilities.

This idea had intrigued me for a while now... in relation to the LiftPort space elevator Case Study, we have been interested in developing some classroom 'work books'. These would not be full texts, but supplemental modules - physics, chemistry, math, computer science, history, literature and even religion and law. If someone would like to tackle a project like that with us, we would be very open to sharing IP/Revenues. We are especially interested in the high-school markets and home school demographics. Anyone want to form a team? take care. mjl

contributed by Michael Laine on Jun 21 6:10pm

The #1 idea that intreges me as a K-12 educator is the California Open Source Textbook Project. Think of the money that could be saved/reallocated from public school district budgets. More states need to jump on this idea. I hope of find some interest for this idea in my district this fall.

contributed by Nathan Mielke on Jul 6 9:01pm

...after thinking about my comment, the impact this can have on students and the classroom is enormous. The challenge will be getting this information into the hands of our teachers. I'm going to do all I can this coming school year to do this. I have high hopes for this.

contributed by Nathan Mielke on Jul 7 3:59pm