The Humanities Holodeck

2020 and Then Some: The Future History of the Humanities

Mr. History. (2006, November 30). Mr. History’s Photostream. Retrieved December 14, 2007, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/57669468@N00/310196051/

The Humanities is not a field generally understood to be forward-looking. Most of what we cover in Humanities classes is concerned with the past – what was life like during the time of Homer, or Shakespeare, or Confucius, or the Buddha. The most forward looking question we usually ask is, how is the present in which we now live shaped by its past? It might seem that a blog devoted to the study and teaching of the Humanities is not very well suited to exploring the future.
But when I started this blog under the title “The Humanities Holodeck,” it wasn’t just a labored attempt to be both cute and alliterative. I was hoping that the blog would be a place where I and others could imagine the ways teaching and learning in the Humanities would reshape under the pressure of new technologies. There seem to be so many possibilities. The one technology-powered dream I’ve had consistently is the holographic classroom experience dream – the one in which I bring a full-sized three dimensional image of Michelangelo’s David – all thirteen feet of it, not including its pedestal – in all of its majesty, beauty, and undeniable power, into the middle of my classroom, to let students see for themselves how a piece of marble can become a life-changing experience. I still hope to see my students having that kind of direct and immediate experience, but based on what I’ve been learning, I think I’ve been dreaming in the wrong direction. I don’t think that Michelangelo will come to me. I think now that it’s far more likely that the schools will be the ones to start moving. The physical limitations that squeezed my first experience of the David into a 8 by 10 inch picture in a textbook may indeed fade, but it won’t be because the David will duck his head to fit into the classroom; it’ll be because the classroom ceiling and walls will fall away.
I expect the first schools to start losing wallboard will be the graduate and professional schools, since their students tend to be adult, self-directed, and motivated. These students are likely to choose a highly technologized education without waiting for the system to give them permission – they are already doing so – and the schools will get dragged into it by their students. Next will be high schools and undergraduate college programs in core curricula – those with a relatively large percentage of their instruction delivered by scholar-at-podium-in-huge-lecture-hall type standard lectures. This too is already happening. Right now I can get lectures by top scholars from major universities delivered to my computer and iPod through iTunes’s podcast offerings. In a series of YouTube videos, Ray Kurzweil, noted futurist and entrepreneur, tells us that MIT is now starting an “open courseware program to provide all MIT courses available for free on the Internet” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcGLquxsfdM&feature=related). With podcasts, vodcasts, and so many other online resources available at students’ fingertips, basic educational opportunities can no longer be determined purely by location. As students and students’ parents start to recognize this, schools will have to follow, particularly as the corporate world starts to accept as valid these forms of education, and starts to hire people educated this way. For a while at least, probably for a long while, primary education will remain local and classroom-based. Most parents of small children will likely be fairly hesitant to depend on computer-based education. Working parents will need someone to supervise their child, and there will be concerns about socialization skills. So I don’t expect local elementary schools to drop away. Quite the contrary – they will be all the more needed to train children in the basic skills of reading, writing, and math, and in computer and technology skills they’ll need at the upper levels and in the workplace.
Eventually, perhaps as soon as 2020, we might have only two types of localized, class-based education left – the primary school, and the small seminar, mainly existing in elite institutions of higher education. Unfortunately, I suspect that eventually the small seminar format will become a luxury – the educational version of the gated community, reserved for the upper tier and the privileged. I can imagine that participants of these symposia would see themselves as members of an exclusive society, those who can afford to pursue artistic and intellectual interests unsullied by the crass necessity to apply what one is talking about to the real world. Such a structure might have a blog for continuing a discussion, but I can’t imagine that the blog would be open to the Web as a whole, nor would its participants favor using Web-based technologies for anything but what couldn’t be avoided, like making airplane reservations. They would survive as a bastion of tradition, elitism, the old ivy-covered ivory tower, and good old gaudiamus igitur. Bless their hearts, and let the ivy grow over their giant, wood-burning fireplace mantels and overstuffed leather chairs. Some things just don’t change.
So where would that leave the Humanities? Is it to be consigned to one of those ivory tower rooms, priding itself on its own isolation? I hope not. I have to think not. Here’s what I see as the dual role of Humanities education in the future that I have described: as it has been and will be – the preserver of what is best about the past so that best is not lost amid change, and as the means by which we envision what is human in our future. The kinds of technological change described and promoted by Siemen’s connectivism carry enormous potential for good, as is charmingly envisioned by Karl Fisch (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7281108124087435381), but there are also dangers. The Humanities can help to remind us of what we could lose, and what we ought to protect.
Danger #1 – We are in danger of losing our privacy. As we become more connected, we become more traceable. We already know that Google and Amazon keep a careful eye on our online doings. So far, it’s not been a problem. I like getting notices of new publications in subjects I care about, especially as the system gets better and better at predicting what I really want to know about. But it’s a bit creepy to know that somewhere there’s a database with my name on it, containing everything I’ve every asked about online. Someday, it might become more than creepy. It might become scary, if the information is misused. The study of the Humanities might help us remember why there are guarantees written into the Constitution to prevent unwarranted searches.
Danger #2 – We are in danger of losing our capacity to function independently. Connectivity is wonderful. Cooperation is a good thing. Art by committee is not. Really original art and science are not usually the products of group think. In a world in which we are expected to act and think as “nodes” in a connectivist network, we will need to hold on to the possibility of saying no. The Humanities offers us Van Gogh and Da Vinci, Socrates, Martin Luther, Thoreau, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Gandhi. These were not go-along-to-get-along people. We can’t forget them, nor afford to forget why we need them.
Danger #3 – We are in danger of becoming more and more factionalized, through social networking. Earlier in a discussion post, I spoke of James Madison’s Federalist Papers, and of his fear of factions, that we would now call “special interests”. According to Madison, human beings will always form factions when they are free to do so, and factions will try to manipulate power. The more powerful factions grow, the less well a democracy can operate for the good of all. If Madison had known about the Web and its ability to allow people with common interests to combine and organize, he would have screamed out a warning. He still can, if we listen.
The Humanities is therefore something of a set of brakes, but it’s also a steering wheel. Knowing where we have been and where we are, which is all we really can know, helps us determine the direction we can go. We need to understand our own culture and the other cultures of the world. Without that, as we walk ahead, we walk blind.
So the necessity is still there, but the ways in which the Humanities can and must be learned have to accept the potential power of new media. If the David can’t yet fit into my classroom, I can fit the class into a computer, using Skype, and teleport us all to Florence. That’s not such a bad thing, after all.

Ray Kurzweil’s interviews on the future of technology in education:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcGLquxsfdM&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWWW0tLtskk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWOoCyV77zk&feature=related

I’ve seen a number of applications in the last day or two that I could easily imagine being useful or just plain interesting to a student. Google for Educators has an application for Google’s Lunar X Prize contest (http://www.google.com/educators/xprize.html) that offers all sorts of goodies for science, math, rocketry, and space exploration. As a mom whose husband and daughter are both involved in model rocketry, I felt my radar going off when I saw it. One part of it includes a set of short videos and animations on space exploration and rockets – very useful for the learner who needs activity, sound, and motion. (http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/lunar/education/videos-and-demonstrations) Included in this is a “visualizer” that uses Google Earth to create an image of a building at any address in Google Earth’s database with full sized rockets standing next to it. So, if a student is a visual learner, we could enter an address familiar to him or her, like the school building where our class met, and see what it would look  like if a Saturn V were to suddenly appear in the parking lot next to the building.

Another application that caught my attention was ThinkFree, the online office suite. Of all the online office application packages reviewed in Computerworld‘s review, this one got the strongest recommendations.  (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=internet_applications&articleId=9007884&taxonomyId=168&intsrc=kc_feat), The potential for uses for students in Humanities classes is enormous. Unlike the usual office suites, ThinkFree and several other online packages offer the potential for Web-based document creation, which means that documents can be shared and accessed from any computer with Web access. That also means that a student who needs or wants editing, responses, suggestions or advice, whether from the instructor, a research partner, or an interviewed guest expert, can ask people to join the party through the Web, and allow them to directly participate in the document’s creation. The student would still control the document, but the potential for productive interaction and collaboration would make this own process feel that much more alive and real.

The topic for this post is the paperless class. First question: how would a paperless class change my role as a teacher?

My answer: it would not so much change my role as a teacher as it would change what happens in front of the classroom, as I no longer stand there wasting time and energy, struggling desperately to to find that one set of notes, the attendance sheet,  the student paper that hadn’t gotten back to the student yet because she was out sick on the day I returned the assignment, the announcement from the administration, the course schedule, the study guides, etc. etc. I dream of a paperless classroom.

But that’s not really what a paperless classroom is about. It’s about students depending on electronic rather than hard sources and resources. Can a student really learn as well or better when there are no books, no paper notes, no pen, and no “paper” to turn in, have graded, and hold in one’s hand as a complete and completed work? Do students benefit from interacting with an object they can touch?

I think so, but I think we would lose some things and gain others. Paperless means students can’t be measured by just being present in the classroom. They would have to interact with each other more and therefore take a more proactive role. That means I would be less central, less likely to lecture. But as we see in Beshkin’s article, (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record/archives/vol26/vol26_iss10/2610_Paperless_Course.html) the teaching still goes on. Discussion still revolves around the same questions. My expertise on the topic would still have to be there.  So though I would not be the “sage on the stage”, I can live with that.

How would paperlessness change learning? Students would have more options open to them. Instead of a standard paper, a student could create a web site, or a mini-museum, or any number of types of multimedia presentations, allowing visual and auditory learners to learn better. Available video and audio resources would make it  possible for me to raise the standard for what’s expected in students’ work. It would also make it possible for students to collaborate more readily, or to take control of what and how they want to learn.

This does present some problems for grading. Different types of presentations mean that I would have to establish and make clear (including to myself) what the standards governing grades are, no matter the type of presentation. In that situation, establishing a consistent and clear set of standards, a rubric that’s applicable to a dozen different forms, might be a bit touchy. On the other hand,  it would make grading so much more fun, any problems would be worth the trouble.

Would it help or harm the development of a learning network? I would think that, in an online course during which there is no face-to-face contact, the network might be more flexible, but also looser and  less coherent. The students interact more,  during more of the day. But they would perhaps miss the actual physical contact, and the resulting sense of identifying with a place as well as a group.   In a blended course, what would change in the learning network is its size and inclusiveness. Students and the one teacher wouldn’t  be alone together. They’d be travelers together in a much larger environment.

Having said all of that, there are still reasons I would probably never want to go completely paperless. I love the feel of a real book in my hands, the pleasure of opening it for the first time, or returning to an old and dear friend. I want to turn the pages, flip through them, hold the book in my hand, and own it. I need the security and concrete verifiability of the paper object. I also believe strongly in physical interaction with a text. Years ago, I read an essay by Mortimer Adler entitled, “How to Mark a Book.” The essay makes a convincing argument for writing in our books as a way to create a living and active conversation with a text. I have found this claim born out over and over again by my students’ and my own experience. How can I have a real love affair with a book, when it’s never touched my hands, and when my questions, challenges, responses, and exclamations  never find its pages?  Yes, I can write those all to a blog, and I can have that conversation quite readily with other readers. But not with the text itself. In a paperless world, there can never be a permanent physical record of the growth of a relationship between the reader and the book. So while I would never miss the part where I can’t find those test papers in the pile of junk on my desk, I would miss the personal poetry that is expressed in the bookmaker’s art. I would miss my books. Let’s just get rid of all the rest, and give the trees a break.

In Will Richardson’s book, he speaks of the ten “Big Shifts” coming at us from the emerging possibilities of the Read/Write Web. They all will have their place in the educational lives of today’s and tomorrow’s students and teachers, but the question I want to deal with is, how will they affect the teaching and learning of the Humanities in particular?
It seems to me that there are several of Richardson’s “Big Shifts” that are relevant to Humanities education. The most obvious one is “Big Shift #2: Many, Many Teachers and 24/7 Learning.” Since the Humanities is the study of all the products of the human mind and hand, all human beings from all cultures and all areas of expertise are part of the gigantic picture we are trying to understand. The more voices, the better. In the past, I have asked guest speakers into my classroom, but it’s always difficult and the time we have is limited. Skype, blogging, podcasting, and vodcasting will make it much easier to do what used to be difficult, and make possible what used to be inconceivable, like asking a textile artist in Ghana to spend some time talking to my class about modern kente cloth making. Maybe he or she could even show us the weaving process, and then send us the finished cloth. How cool would that be!
On the other hand, “Big Shift #5: Readers Are No Longer Just Readers” looks more revolutionary than it is. The argument there is that when students do research, they can no longer assume that what they are reading is reliable. They must become critical, skeptical, and most important, capable of determining for themselves what they can believe and what they should challenge. This is not new. We should have been questioning the value and accuracy of published sources all along. I have taught and will continue to teach skills of fact-checking, bias awareness, and source evaluation, because no source should be treated as infallible. So though the principle behind “Big Shift” is important, the “Big Shift” is not really that big a shift.
I guess, then, that the biggest real “Big Shift” for me as a Humanities teacher is “Big Shift#3: The Social, Collaborative Construction of Meaningful Knowledge.” As a teacher who has for years bemoaned the artificiality of most school assignments (Write a paper for an audience consisting of the imaginary constructs existing only in your teacher’s brain, on a topic not even the teacher cares about, for no one to ever read except maybe the teacher. Maybe.), I welcome the chance to see students’ work actually and consciously created for real use, and created to become a living part of the larger community. This is truly new to me, for assignments have until now been almost invariably isolated from the real world by the very fact they’re school assignments. We’ve assumed that they would never need to emerge from their protective cocoon of irrelevance. Now, that work will be out of its cocoon before its wings are fully dry.
Perhaps we’ll be losing something that we will need to think about. Until now, those assignments were safe places for students to practice, sort of like empty parking lots for student drivers. Where is “safe” now? For students in the Humanities classroom, learning something new always means taking risks, but until now, the risks have come from our becoming more aware of the world – from frighteningly new ideas we could encounter in unfamiliar places and times. But now the risks can come from the world’s growing awareness of us. I have to learn how to involve my students in the huge whole world of human culture, but I can’t forget that I need to let them explore that world a little at a time, on their own terms. I’m not sure how best to use all the technologies available to accomplish this. Maybe someone out there has a suggestion or two?

It seems to me that the most revolutionary thing about Skype is that it’s inexpensive. Such connections have been possible for a while, but the costs of a long-distance audio-video hook-up almost anywhere I want it would be outlandishly outside most schools’ price range. So for me, the whole Skype idea is like being given a chartered jet, fueled, piloted, and ready to take my students and me wherever in the world we want to go, provided that there’s an airport. Imagine the possibilities. When we’re studying the epic poem Sunjata, a story that is still presented in oral performance in West Africa pretty much as it has been since the 13th century, we could have a Skype connection to a portion of a live performance, and then talk to the audience and perhaps even the performer afterwards. Or I could ask the museum curator at a lesser-known small museum in southern France to talk to us about the museum’s collection of Gothic church art. Or I could arrange to have my students see and hear the organ in the church in Leipzig where Bach played and conducted his cantatas. Or we could ask the astronaut who wrote poetry about his experience to talk to us about being weightless, and about poetry. Talk about options!
It’s almost too much. Having all these flashy dreams is one thing, but getting the technological capability actually running is quite another. The teacher who introduced his students to a class of Peruvian kids learned how wonderful it could be, but he also ran into technological hitches. Such hitches, if I’m not ready for them or haven’t planned to be flexible, can punch a hole in the perfect dream. And then there’s not letting the dreaming get too far ahead of the hard realities of what is politically and culturally possible. Trying to Skype in on a Sunjata performance might be seen as intrusive or inappropriate by its audience or the performer. That museum curator might not have the time or the means to show us much. The church in Leipzig might be off limits to cameras. This tool, like all the others we’ve examined, is only able to allow the physical connection. It can’t provide the human connections that are just as necessary.

I’ve been reading the arguments and criticisms on connectivism this week. The results are one pair of crossed eyes, some questions, and some fairly strong reactions, both positive and negative. For example, on the class wiki page presenting the arguments against connectivism as a legitimate learning theory, I saw this:

“At the high school level, some teachers may struggle with the connectivism approach because of strong filtering, blocked access to every interpersonal communication tool, tightly locked networks, etc. Many school districts deny student access to chats, blogs, social networking sites, VOIP and any peer-to-peer sharing. ‘We can’t isolate and artificially protect children the majority of the day when they are no longer behind our filters.’ (Educational Bazaar Blog, http://teachers4schools.com/open/?p=5#more-5 )”.
http://bcefall0710pls.wikispaces.com/Con+Connect

My initial reaction to this is that it is not so much a criticism of the theory as it is a criticism of the educational bureaucracy that prevents teachers from putting the theory into practice. But as I consider this further, along with other discussions on social networking safety issues (After all, connectivism advocates making connections and seeing relationships), I wondered if the rush to accept technological change is always in the best interests of the students, who depend on their elders to use their knowledge and experience to protect them. Just because kids love using the latest tech toys doesn’t necessarily mean we should abandon all caution and let them jump into the deep end of the Internet pool without any lifeguards or swimming lessons.

I’m also troubled by the connectivists’ apparent assumption that all people younger than 25 are automatically going to feel comfortable and happy using the latest technologies, and that there’s a natural correspondence between youth and technological expertise, confidence, and comfort, and a parallel correspondence between age and technological fear and/or incompetence. I, frankly, think that this is stereotyping. Not all kids enjoy sitting for hours at the computer. Not all kids, not even all kids who have the option, have MySpace or Facebook profiles by the time they’re twelve, or prefer electronic sources of information over books, or enjoy using instant messaging or texting more than talking. My experience, limited as it is, sees a large number of students who know how to write on a word processor and send email, but don’t know how to send the document they’ve created electronically as an attachment to an email. There are some that know how to create their own Web page, but a far larger number of my students don’t. Why are we assuming that all young people know more than all older people about electronic media?

There are consequences to this, as I see it, dangerously incorrect assumption. If we expect students to be more interested in an assignment only because we’re making the assignment tech-based, we won’t be prepared when it doesn’t work. Let’s say, for instance, that I assume that my students, because they’re younger than I am, will naturally just fall into blogging. So I assign students to work together on a class blog, and then find half the students have never blogged before, and most of those have no wish to start. So much for that idea. And yes, they’ll need to learn the tech tools, and it’s still important to include them. Just not on the understanding that high tech toys are automatically going to cover everything they touch with the irresistible shimmer of magic fairy dust/student motivation.

Another question is, if connectivism says that learning is an ongoing process that never sees a real “completion” (an idea with which I heartily agree in principle), what will we mean when we say that a student has “completed” an assignment. “passed a class” or “graduated”? Won’t those terms be meaningless?

In short, I think connectivism has some important contributions to make to educational practice. But first, its application has to be possible and practical. Second, its application has to be a good idea on more levels than just it’s new and cool. Third, we can’t be asking it to solve every problem we’ve got. Finally, we don’t have to assume that we have to throw out everything old and start over from scratch. Connectivism can be put into practice without tearing out every ivy leaf in the Ivy League. But what will the middle ground look like?

Podcasts in the Classroom –  

http://www.epnweb.org/player.php?podshow=http://www.sfmoma.org/podcasts/2007/october/sfmoma_artcast_october07.mp3&podcast=SFMOMA%20Artcasts&program=SFMOMA%20Artcasts:%20October%202007%20(no%20images)

I had the chance to listen to this podcast from a series called “Artcasts”, done by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and finally found in it an example of a podcast that I would be happy to use in a class. Until this point, I had been relatively unsatisfied with the podcasts I had heard – many of them were nothing more than a person talking into a microphone. Some of them were rather disappointingly poorly recorded, making them difficult to understand, while others offered little more than a recording of someone thinking aloud. This series of podcasts offer a really interesting combination of audio experiences; the one I listened to presented, in 5 1/2 minutes, the voice of the artist Olafur Eliaisson talking about his work, the reactions of a variety of people in the museum to Eliasson’s piece, information on the exhibition, more information on the “box artist” Joseph Cornell, and author Joyce Carol Oates reading a fascinating prose poem, “The Box Artist”, that she had written in reaction to Cornell’s art. A podcast like this demonstrates how rich, varied , and interesting an audio experience can be.

A podcast like this would obviously help auditory learners in my course. But that by itself wouldn’t justify its use. The idea here would be to create, as a classmate put it, a “virtual field trip.” If my students can’t get to the museum, I will bring the museum to them. I might throw in a poet and author of the caliber of Joyce Carol Oates while I’m at it. Podcasts, if done well, can put experience into a small pocket.

Jamie Barras. (2007, July 15). Greece, 2003. Jamie Barras’ Photostream. Retrieved November 20, 2007, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/ddtmmm/817212700/in/set-72157600832691751/

I found this very detailed image of the Porch of the Caryatids of the Erechtheion, the Acropolis of Athens, among the over 70 other images of Greece in one file on Flickr. A search on the tag “Acropolis” yielded 52,830 results. For a Humanities teacher who is always looking for good images that I can show my class, this makes my mouth water. I remember the days when I would hunt through a couple dozen poor quality slides, looking for one or two that might give my students some idea of the grandeur of the mountainside where the Oracle of Delphi had stood, or a close-up glimpse of the exquisite detailing of a Persian miniature. Not no more, folks. And I thought that the Google Image Search function was cool.

Obviously, then, Flickr is useful just for its potential as an image catalogue. But I can also imagine asking my students to share images they’ve taken of class-related subjects. Or we could create a slide show that could be used in a class wiki or blog. A student could juxtapose images in a visual arts portfolio, presenting a mini-museum tour or an exhibition on a particular theme. Another student might create a narrative or find meaning in a set of images that appear unrelated. Another possibility is to establish a course portfolio, with images that get used from one semester to another, and that can be augmented, changed, or rotated, like the old slide show, but with far more flexibility and an absolutely stunningly large selection of high-quality images. By gum, this is fun.

      My question concerns an ongoing debate in education, the two sides of which seem unable to talk to each other in any reasonable way. The following article, appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, represents one side of the argument: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/07/2007071101c/careers.html.     

     The article, entitled “Pimp My Course” by Rob Jenkins, concerns itself with the author’s sense of being “left behind” by technological change, and worries -  tongue-in-cheek – about getting old-fashioned. Jenkins never overtly defends his tendancy to want to hold on to the low-tech ways, and the article is written with disarming self-deprecation. But beneath it all, however,  is a mind-set common among Baby-Boomer generation teachers: that the way we’ve always taught is right and proper, and there’s no really compelling need to change.     

     On the other side is a blog written by PZ  Myers:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/07/the_chronicle_does_it_again.php     

     This blog entry goes on the attack, as in the opening: ”They’ve got another article from some fuddy-duddy prof who doesn’t like the 21^st century. It seems to be nothing but a long whine about modern teaching technologies — it’s rather pathetic, actually, but the Chronicle seems to have a fondness for running occasional articles from defensive, confused Luddites.“    

      While it seems to me that Myers is being unnecessarily harsh to those who don’t share his enthusiasm for emerging technologies, I see his point. We are confronting the effects of rapidly changing technology in every aspect of life, including education. And education is, or should be, designed to respond to the needs of the future, since that is where our students are going to be spending the rest of their lives. But I also see Jenkin’s side. Is it necessary or even wise to utterly abandon the past? Do we need to throw out everything older than a particular date, like grocery store items past their date codes? Do I mark my teaching training, “Use or freeze by January 1, 2008″?      

     It is becoming a cliché that many veteran teachers, especially in the Liberal Arts, are resistant to learning the new technologies. They argue that some fields just don’t adapt well to life in cyberspace. Other fields, like the sciences, business, and some of the applied arts, are well suited to the newer methods. For those, let there be on-line. But, they say, you can’t teach Moby Dick via the Internet. A discussion group sitting together in a seminar room is what’s needed to grapple with the rhythms and sonorities of Milton and Shakespeare. For introducing students to the intricacies of Plato, Descarte, and Kant, you need old-fashioned, plain old books, with pages in them that can be marked up and flipped back and forth. And for Homer or Gilgamesh, it’s unthinkable. At least, some think so.   

      What do you think? Are there some fields or some subjects within particular fields for which the new technologies are unsuited? Is there a limit to what the tools can do? If so, where is that limit, and do we have enough good sense to recognize it when we see it? 

First, I have never come close to even considering making a change to a wiki. It seemed like the height of presumption – that I might dare to change someone else’s work without their permission, without our even knowing each other. I still have concerns about that and other aspects of wikiness, but as I was exploring, I did come across some wikis that appeared to have no problem with being tampered with. I saw this wiki by Tim Fredrick, http://timfredrick.pbwiki.com/ which offers resources and ideas to teachers and welcomes input and suggestions. Fredrick’s work helped me understand that wikis are not about the knowledge I can demonstrate I have, or the ideas I can claim, or the words I can claim to have written, as a blog might be. Wikis are about opening up to the suggestions and ideas of others. They’re not soapboxes or stages; they’re conceptual swapmeets. That’s cool.

That said, working on creating a wiki has had its challenges. My ego gets bruised easily, when something on which I spent time and thought suddenly disappears or is replaced. Working in a group of people who are  on different schedules can be incredibly frustrating; we can’t actually have a normal conversation and iron out misunderstandings. We keep missing each other’s messages, not hearing each other’s questions, not knowing what is going to happen to the work that’s already been done, not being sure that what we’re doing is what the others expected or wanted. If I do a cooperative wiki again, I’d want to allow for more time to work out who would do what, and how we would communicate with each other. It might be a good idea to choose a leader or coordinator, someone who could organize and make decisions, to establish a control center and finalize things. 

 I have learned some very useful lessons, about what not to do and about what works well.  I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t use a wiki in most of my classes without first running a tutorial on how to wiki. Half the week was spent on fumbling around with the technology. Another thing I learned was to emphasize the wiki as a place for sharing rather than as a platform for showcasing individual work. I’ve also learned some new uses for Wikipedia, and how I can use it and allow my students to use it without treating it as merely a poor and unreliable version of a traditional research tool. That’s the thing – it’s not a traditional research tool at all. It’s a forum.

To sum up, this afternoon I was working on my wiki with the help of a marvelous person in our Instructional Technology Department when another marvelous person I have taught with for years came in. She was one of our pioneers in on-line teaching, and no slouch in technology tool use. But when I answered her question about what we were doing, she said, “Wikis? I never allow my students to use Wikipedia. Why are you even doing anything with a wiki?”  She had immediately assumed that Wikipedia represented the entire wiki universe, and that teachers of serious scholarship would of course have nothing to do with any of that.  While I’m not at all sure that I’m ready to use wikis in every class, or even in most of my courses, I do see that they have real uses, and that things can be done that way that can’t be done in any other. It’s like learning a new language. You find out that you can say things, even think things, that you couldn’t before. Cool indeed.