CSC/ECE 506 Spring 2010/KU Village

Experience with a student-written wiki textbook supplement

Edward F. Gehringer

Karishma Navalakha

Reejesh Kadanjoth

North Carolina State University

{efg, knnavala, rkadanj}@ncsu.edu

Abstract

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. We are developing software to assist in this effort. This presentation discusses our experience with the process and the software in an advanced course on parallel computer architecture, where students were assigned to write supplements for each textbook chapter, describing how the theory covered in class was realized in state-of-the-art multicore processors.

Introduction

In the last half-dozen years, the wiki has emerged as one of the leading collaborative tools on the Web. It has the advantage that editing is done in place, without the need to pass copies around by e-mail. This eases collaboration, by making it obvious which version is the most current. Moreover, changes become visible instantly to anyone who accesses a page, which means that no intervention by the instructor is needed to disseminate new versions to the rest of the class. These characteristics make it possible for students to work together to write text that is intended to be read by their fellow students.

Forward-looking instructors were quick to apply wiki-based collaboration to a task that would heretofore have been intractable: having students write their own peer-reviewed textbook for the class. The advantages are many: Rather than simply consume what is fed to them by the instructor and textbook author(s), students now have to take responsibility for their own learning [NRC 2005], determining what is worthy of being taught to the class. In so doing, the students are "constructing" their own learning. This meshes well with constructivism [Bednar et al. 1991]--the theory that in order to assimilate knowledge thoroughly, students must "build" it in their own minds rather than simply receive it from an external source. Assigned textbooks deprive students of the motivation to decide what topics are relevant and remove the need to evaluate different points of view. For this reason, they have been called "inconsistent with constructivist principles" [Cunningham et al. 2000].

Researching a wiki textbook forces students to read the primary literature--a skill that is very necessary in the outside world, and one that is rarely given thorough attention in undergraduate courses. If left to their own devices, students favor secondary research sources like Wikipedia [Rainie 2007]. Ironically, this testifies both to the attractiveness of the wiki for constructing reference works, and the need to encourage students to do their own research.

Writing a textbook article is beneficial because it is expository writing. A broad body of knowledge supports the idea of "writing across the curriculum" [Barnett and Blumner 2008], which says that writing experience should be integrated into every academic discipline, rather than confined to writing courses. By contributing to the textbook, students gain experience writing up their thoughts for an audience of their peers. Feedback from their classmates helps them learn from their mistakes and improve their writing skills.

Finally, in a world where textbook prices are a significant component of the cost of education, student-authored textbooks have the ability to save students money. Surprisingly, there is little evidence that students benefit from what they pay for their textbooks. A four-year old English study found "no correlation between textbook purchase and the grade received" [Carpenter et al. 2006]. While there is a developing body of research on student-authored wiki textbooks, little research has been done on the efficacy of most commercial textbooks, either before or after publication [Revs et al. 2004].

The administrative burden

Wikis take care of version control and dissemination of student writing, but many administrative issues remain. Writing a textbook is a series of different projects, which usually need to be spaced out throughout the semester. One must arrange for at least one student to choose each of the chapters or topics that need to be included. In a face-to-face class, this can be arranged by passing around a signup sheet, but in a distance-education class, software support is needed. Even in a face-to-face class, software support is useful, because choices made by students are registered automatically in the system, and students have an equal ability to sign up while there are still many topics available.

Appropriate deadlines must be assigned for each topic or chapter. Peer review requires separate deadlines for submission and review ... and, if authors are to revise their work in response to peer comments, there must be resubmission and final review deadlines as well. There is usually a precedence relationship between topics: Some topics must be learned before other topics can be presented. This means that the same four deadlines (submission, initial review, etc.) are applied to different work at different times during the semester. A topic may not be written on before all prerequisite topics have been completed. Getting all of these deadlines set is time consuming, and sending reminders to the students involved makes it more complex. Software support is clearly desirable. In the Expertiza system [Gehringer et al. 2007, Gehringer 2009], we have implemented support for signup sheets and staggered deadlines [Gehringer, Kadanjoth and Kidd 2010].

Experience with wiki-textbook writing

While designing the structure for the course ECE 506 Architecture of Parallel Computer, a graduate level program, we discussed many ideas to make the course relevant to the industry which has shown important ramifications in recent years in the field of Parallel Computing. We wanted to make sure that the students learn about the fundamental basics which are described well in text books and at the same time update themselves with recent developments. By making the students write wiki pages which not only served as a learning tool but also created supplements to previous text books which needed constant revisions due to the number of supercomputers designed every year. Presently Top 500 supercomputer list is being released biannually.

Initially the idea of wiki pages was not clear to students. The initial wiki pages had a lot of duplication of the text book. Students wanted to give a complete coverage of the chapter. We wanted them to concentrate on recent developments. A lot of reviewing time was required for the initial releases.

We started by giving the students complete freedom to explore resources and come up with wiki pages. This initial approach did not prove very useful. After every chapter covered in class, four students were required to sign up for writing the wiki page for that particular chapter. They were asked to add additional information which is not included in the chapter. The chapters covered in the class followed a certain sequence and had a logical flow with respect to the previous chapter. We realized that students were not aware that the information they find is already present in the next chapter which they have not studied yet. The first review which we gave students was mainly about making them aware of topics covered in later chapters. A lot of effort put in by students was unnecessarily wasted. After the first two rounds we changed gears and provided links to students which included information which we wanted the students to pay more attention to. We had weekly meetings regarding the topics which we would like to incorporate for every chapter. To come up with a list of topics we referred the previous text book, technology news as well as websites of every major processor giants. We realized the quality of wiki pages improved and energy of students was more channelized.