Curriculum
From Studyplace
curriculum -i n'. [running; a contest in running, race; raceground, course, lap; a racing chariot].[1]
As a place for study, StudyPlace can be of use in academic courses. StudyPlace is an open wiki and it is easy to set a course up on it in ways that promote student participation. Since all parts of the site are open to view by anyone, however, it is appropriate neither for administering examinations nor for grading, and no one should post private information on it.
In addition to hosting courses and providing them with a flexible means of participant interaction, StudyPlace may offer a means through which students can participate in advancing knowledge and understanding more fully than would otherwise be possible. StudyPlace provides a shared, self-correcting forum in which students can contribute as working scholars, engaging in peer production on significant topics. Anyone wanting to advance discussion of what educates can contribute. As a consequence, constructive assignments in diverse courses can culminate as contributions to it, while the course instructor maintains full control in setting the task and in assessing the results.
Courses on StudyPlace
As a provider of online support for courses, StudyPlace has special goals. Through StudyPlace courses, we want to engender high levels of open-ended inquiry through substantive interactions between students, other scholars, and the resources of their field. We want the work done through courses to become more thoroughly public, part of a developing digital commons, and able to gain cumulatively, year by year, in depth and quality. A digital commons such as StudyPlace will become pedagogically innovative as it enables students to engage, directly and productively, in real academic work, in advancing the state of knowledge, skills, and understanding about chosen problems of public support.
To move towards these goals, we want course support tools to integrate the pedagogic process more fully into the intellectual apparatus of academic scholarship and research. As a peer-produced, digital commons, that is what StudyPlace aims to do. It invites courses to locate within it in order to contribute to its overall project. And, in doing that, it seeks to redesign course support tools, such as an online syllabus, to facilitate student interaction in and through the digital commons. This purpose is more easily stated than achieved, however, for it departs from deeply ingrained practices. Familiar pedagogic processes embody the idea that students and instructors interact among themselves and with their subject in and through a course, not a commons. The course defines and bounds expectations and is the enclave within which students and a teacher work together in a scheduled time and place. Such practices seem natural and necessary to us all.
Alternatives will emerge only through cycles of exploratory design and experimentation. StudyPlace is not a service group for the support of course work, but a locus for practical experimentation with the pedagogic process, displacing its center from the course into the commons. How can the ongoing work that students do for their course become fully integrated into activity that scholars do to develop, expand, correct, and disseminate the shared body of knowledge of our culture?[2] We engage in design research to develop answers to this question, and the effort is still at a very early stage of development. Yet certain principles are increasingly clear.
- First, and most simple, the affordances of MediaWiki make all activities in the course open to public view and to interjection online by anyone from the public.[3]
- Second, insofar as possible, study and productive activity should be framed by resources developed for the digital commons rather than those developed uniquely for the course. For instance, in StudyPlace every article has an associated study page, which should reflect the ideal agenda of inquiry for the topic of the article in the considered judgment of knowledgeable scholars. Better that a course instructor contribute to develop that study page than elaborating a unique assignment on his syllabus and then for the syllabus point his students to the most appropriate elements of that study page.[4]
- Third, activities conducted within a course can contribute to the digital commons as their result. For instance, an instructor might ask a small group to develop an entry in the commons on the educational work of someone essential to the course, creating an agenda of inquiry for the study page and drafting an initial entry for the article page. Or where material already existed in the commons to evaluate and revise it constructively, explaining in the Talk section the rationale for the changes made. Such activities by single students, pairs, or small groups, can take place whether or not StudyPlace hosts the course in question.
Using StudyPlace for assignments or as a course host
If you want to integrate the use of StudyPlace into your courses, all you need to do is decide accordingly and do it, for you need no permission or authorization from anyone. Just check the site out, request some help from site administrators if you need it, and begin to try out what seems to fit your instructional aims and your expectations of students.
|
Spring 2007 Fall 2006 |
StudyPlace has eight broad components. Keep in mind their general character in thinking about how to integrate course activities into one or more of them.
- Concepts comprise fairly specific ideas of use in thinking about what educates. Some pivotal concepts, like common knowledge, form projects for systematic development. One might want a major component of a course address such a project, or a specific assignment might concentrate on developing an article and study agenda for a specific concept key to both the course and the commons. Discussion in StudyPlace of many importance has neither started nor been suggested. You might want your students to decide on new topics for inclusion — a digital commons and responsibility for its contents belongs as much to them as to anyone else.
- Subjects are broader than concepts and include the disciplined forms of inquiry that generate the current state of knowledge about education and pedagogy. Most courses on StudyPlace will have a place within one of the subjects treated on it. StudyPlace aims to treat each subject at three levels, explaining why the subject is important to the public at large, covering in a clear, concise way what people need to know and understand to gain substantive mastery of the subject, and explaining current advances in ways that will effectively inform creative effort to carry the matter further. You might want to ask students individually or in groups to improve on the treatment of your subject at one of these levels, or to draft such treatment if it no one has yet begun it.
- People includes individuals of diverse types of achievement whose accomplishments make them significant as educators, people whose work has added to what educates. Often these are precisely the sorts of people who are of central significance in many courses. When that is the case, students can contribute to the article pages and study pages on them in StudyPlace or you might have them debate who they want to add and why and then have them initiate inclusion of their choices.
- Essays presents essays by current or historical writers that illuminate what educates. You might have students read and select among a variety of historical works to select and introduce new additions. Or they might as a group read and evaluates their own essays and select two or three for inclusion on StudyPlace.
- Reviews evaluate the educative power of books, movies, plays, and exhibitions, and the like. As written work you might ask students to select and review on StudyPlace works and productions pertinent to your course.
- The Commons provides contributors to StudyPlace with a venue for reflecting on the overall project itself and the use of a digital commons as a means to develop and disseminate ideas. You might encourage your students, as they work with StudyPlace, to contribute to the Commons in lieu of other work or in a supplement to it. Such reflection may be very valuable to current students for as they become mature scholars, chances are high that the digital commons will be a more important feature of their intellectual world.
- Courses is here, this page providing the raceway for materials supporting courses in which the participants make use of StudyPlace. You might ask your students to think about this course and others and to make suggestions leading to the fuller integration of the course into the digital commons of which it is a part.
- Help provides access to explanations about how to do what contributors might potentially want to do. Whether the help resources are effective limits innovation and the quality of activity with online tools. As part of their introduction to these, you might ask students to evaluate and improve the help resources shaping what they can see to do with the site and facilitating their doing it.
Notes and references
- ↑ University of Notre Dame. Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid curriculum. Retrieved January 13, 2007
- ↑ The existing pedagogic process has achieved these goals at its most advanced levels with the tradition of the research seminar in the university, for the seminar exists in its field and discipline, rather than the subject existing, epitomized within a course. The digital technologies potentially create the opportunity to adapt and transform seminar practices to make them appropriate and effective at earlier stages of the educational progression, adding new sources of intelligence and energy to the academic effort.
- ↑ Of course, whether members of the public make use of these affordances is moot. However, the affordances must first exist and people inside course need to start acting in ways that take them into account for there to be something into which members of the public might view and interject. As people start taking advantage of new affordances, real innovations bootstrap themselves historically.
- ↑ For practical purposes in the immediate future, both article pages and study pages are just beginning to develop on StudyPlace. Until they do, assignments developed on a syllabus are more likely to become the initial iteration an agenda of inquiry on a study page than is the reverse likely to happen.
Except where