The course syllabus the first day surprised Stormie Batten - no textbook. The professor surprised her more. The class, he said, is going to write its own.
It's going to be online. Future classes - and anyone else - may use it for free. And anyone can edit it, update it or comment on it forever - or as long as the Internet holds out....
Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education is the name of both the groundbreaking Old Dominion University course and its text-under-construction this semester, all 15 chapters and 95 sections of it.
Professor Dwight Allen said he wanted his beginning education students to become critical thinkers, and figured this was a good way to encourage that...."At some point we may be humbled by it," the 75-year-old Allen said with a laugh. "But so far we're getting away with it." ...
Allen's experiment fits into the trend toward "open access scholarship," in which the Web is used like a big, free scholarly journal, said James G. Milles, an associate dean at the University at Buffalo Law School who tracks academic uses of the digital world.
Still, he and others called it rare for undergraduates such as the sophomores and juniors in Allen's class to tackle this kind of project. "I've never heard of that," Milles said. "But I think it's an exciting idea."
There are still lectures and tests, but the heart of the class is for the students to pick a section topic, research it and write a 1,000-word article on it. Two or three students write separately on the same topic.
The job of their more than 220 classmates - almost two-thirds of whom take the class online - is to read, critique, edit and rate the competing articles. Other teams of graduate students and class members grade them on a more detailed scale. The top-scoring article gets "harvested" into the final book. Students admit it gets competitive....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/20/2006 09:46:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
