TP#13 Wikibook Projects

Background:
Your superintendent has learned that you wrote a Wikibook, and he asks you for your reactions to the Wikibook process and how you think writing Wikibooks (or something like it) might have a place in school. He is so intrigued by your response that he asks you to summarize your ideas on one-page and submit it to him.

Topic:
Write a one-page document (three to five paragraphs) that he can use to share your ideas with his cabinet and school board. In it relate your experience (positive and/or negative) in writing a Wikibook. Explain where such a creative (constructivist) activity might fit in a school. You may also explain where it might not be a good fit. Explain the problems you might expect the project to encounter, and how the problems could be minimized. Wikibooks are only for non-fiction textbooks. Don't let that restriction limit your response because other wiki sites could be used for fiction or non-textbooks

Response
Overview:
The world of wikibooks is closely related but not the same thing as wikipedia. Wikipedia is much more well known currently, and serves as an open content online encyclopedia. Wikibooks on the other hand are intended to be textbooks, meaning they are supposed to facilitate teaching in an area of knowledge and include a unifying theme, and chapters. It is not a forum to display original research but instead copyright approved, referenced, and neutral instructional narrative.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page

Wikibook Reflection:
The use of wikibooks as an instructional or learning tool is quite innovative. Wikibooks are a relatively new thing and one that many are evaluating based on its prowess for use in the educational setting. In my opinion wikibooks may serve a purpose with education in two ways, one in creating wikibooks as class projects and two for using current wikibooks as educational resources (textbooks). I personally feel that the use of wikibooks as educational texts is not appropriate currently but I feel that developing wikibooks for class projects could be applicable to our school in the near future.

In my personal experience I found using a wikibook to be a quite interesting way to learn information. I feel the largest support for using wikibooks is based in research showing that students retain large amounts of knowledge when they teach others a concept or topic. Using wikibooks allows the students to manipulate information and present in to someone else. Does it far surpass rehearsing information for a presentation or for a research paper? To this question I am not quite sure but I did feel that in creating the wikibook I did spend much more time rehearsing and developing the information for the perspective of teaching someone else. Another positive was in the fact that it fostered a constructivist-learning environment outside of the classroom bounds. Wikibooks allow for collaboration, discussion and peer review. Although using the tool for project based learning was interesting I do feel that once the novelty of using this new tool wore off I was left with some negative reflection. First I spend significant amount of time learning how to use the tool and the sandbox language. I spent hours just developing a simple table and learning how to import graphics. I spent a substantial amount of time just being frustrated with the tool and working to get the pages to look the way I wanted them too.

I hold some reservations with using the tool in a k-12 setting and feel that it may best be used in a higher education for the simple fact that it is difficult to develop, write and organize the project. This holds true both for the learners and the teacher. I also think that because wikibooks are solely meant to be non-fiction it block it for use in many of the k-12 subject areas. In doing a little bit of research I found that wikibooks dose have a subsidiary called wikijunior that could be used for non-fiction writing for students k-7 grades.