What if they get something wrong?
University students publishing online for classmates
Did you ever have a classmate at university who got their facts wrong, leading you to miss a key question on an exam? University students have always shared study materials. Notes from a missed lecture. Laboratory data from an experiment that actually worked properly. An explanation of a difficult concept.
Some students survive on this web of support material. That ‘web’ is getting thicker thanks to the ease of use of laptop computers for note taking, iPads, and Facebook for sharing study materials. But, what if a helpful classmate conveys a misunderstanding?
This issue has raised its head in a project that I am involved in. We are pushing to get academics to assign their students in science to publish online. In place of some traditional assignments completed on paper, we want students publishing in new media – blogs, wikis, podcasts, and videos.
An increasing number of academics recognise that such ‘new media’ are appealing to students. They see that a clever video or podcast could capture attention and engagement in a way that a textbook or handout does not. These academics are making videos, podcasts, and animations for their students. That seems a bit labour intensive, though the video created at one university could be used at other universities. But what if we had students create those videos, animations, podcasts, wikis, and blogs?
Here is the educational value. If you are student, and you make a wiki to represent one element in the periodic table, then you will gain a depth of insight that helps you to understand every element in the periodic table. Create an animation about an experimental technique, and there is a significant chance that you have understood the technique well enough to repeat it blindfolded.
That said, academics to whom we describe our project sometimes worry about what happens if a student production team gets the facts wrong. They are concerned that a herd instinct will drive other students to absorb the incorrect information without question. If a student recorded and published a podcast with a conceptual error in it, one could end up with an entire class getting question seventeen on the final exam wrong.
What if we view the rate of errors in student publications as part of their pedagogical strength? Two factors can come into play here. One, the Wikipedia phenomenon – there are people out there who are eager to act as voluntary editors, as arbiters of what is true and well supported. Two, the academic can tell students that a certain fraction of what they see that is created by other students has mistakes in it. That gets students viewing this online material with a measure of skepticism. And, that is exactly what you want them to do – especially in science — view information with skepticism until one is sure that it is correct.
In fact, a colleague told me that something like 30-percent of refereed, published, journal articles in his field contain mathematical errors. That is not even mentioning how many mathematical errors there are in the mass media.
The bottom line here is that student-created new media does not have to be 100-percent correct to have value. Just tell students that when they read something that a classmate has put online, they need to check the details in their notes and textbooks.
That said, it would be useful to monitor today’s student wikis and videos to determine accuracy. Typical error rates can then be reported to their student audience. Early testing on the Peerwise system, where students develop multiple-choice questions for one another, suggests an error rate of about 10-percent. Then again, has anyone investigated the error rate in lecture notes recorded on paper?
What are they really saying? 