The Professor's Notes

Over at Cole Camplese’s blog he has started an interesting conversation concerning the use of Wiki’s in the educational setting. I am curious, especially about many of the uses for Wiki that Alan mentions in the comment section there.
As you perhaps have realized, I am not averse to technology–far from it! But I am unclear on how a personalized, course specific Wiki can be helpful.

Let me explain. I see the Wiki as traditionally viewed, that is many contribute their bits of knowledge, allowing for the aggregation of knowledge (and the self-correction as required), with a limited impact on any individual as that knowledge is created. I contribute that which I feel most comfortable contributing, and hopefully take the time to provide correction when I believe something has been less than helpful, or downright incorrect. BOTTOM LINE: Big gains in accessibility to knowledge, with limited impact on any one person’s time to develop.

If we were to view this as the ideal for a course, developing a base of knowledge for a course of instruction, then I suspect we have actually just provided the faculty member with another way of putting their content forward, but not necessarily made it any simpler for the faculty member, and perhaps in fact have increased their workload if only by adding another learning curve. This is not to say that students couldn’t be used to help develop the content, but their inputs will be widely varied in content and quality, depending on their previous knowledge of the materials, their experience base, and the like. In upper level graduate courses, where students are drawing on a wealth of past educational and work experiences, then perhaps they have much to contribute and share, but can we expect that level of contribution from undergrads?

I have looked at a few of the examples of PB Wiki, and the camping trip, and I find them to be interesting ways of accomplishing what we have had other tools to do before, namely, allow for an online space for the aggregation of information. As an open forum, allowing for the development of information, perhaps this makes sense, but what if your school already has a course management system, such as Blackboard, WebCT, or Angel? Do Wikis provide a new capability, or a duplication of existing capabilities with minor tweaks and changes?

So, my question about the use of Wiki in this way (and my perspective as one faculty member) is: how does it a) make the educational content better, b) make the educator’s life easier freeing us up to focus on content rather than process, or c) enable students to grasp the information in a better/faster/cheaper way?

Ideas?

Many blogs and websites these days, including one of my favorites, Supply Chain Innovations Today, are using rss newsfeeds to provide news and information services right next to their (our?) insightful comments and commentary.

I couldn’t help but chuckle when I saw these two news stories, as the top two stories on the “I, Ramble” site.

Now, the placement of the ads is not controlled by the owner of the blog or website, so this is purely coincidental–at least at how it happens to display on the blog.

It is unfortunate that news stories, once released, seem to have a life of their own.

Regular readers will remember that I have had “issues” with the lack of care exercised by my fellow bloggers on the left when it comes to reporting the facts. In the past, I have challenged the blogging from “A Liberal Dose” when the author mis-represented the facts as reported in the stories he cited. What first drew my attention to that blog was his gross mis-representation of desertions as a “flood” following the start of the Iraq war.

Now, I find that another of my favorite liberal friends not only perpetuates the mis-representation that the Bush tax cuts only helped the richest Americans, but uses a nearly 2 1/2 year old news story to support the claim. I wrote at the time that the democrats had failed to actually read the report before launching their scathing media attack. If you visit my blog entry, you will find my analysis not of the news stories that failed to actually get the story straight, but rather my analysis of the actual CBO report. One key point:

Now, that being said, you would think that the total change in share of the tax burden, or as the CBO report puts it, the total share of the “Individual Income Tax LIabilities” would decrease by a greater rate. But we see that is not the case. According to their report, those people in the top 20% of earners (highest quintile) actually show an increase in the share of the liability for most years, and there are only three years (2006-2008) when the tax share decreases at all for those in the top 1%. On the other hand, those in the bottom 60% of earners show a decrease in the total share of income tax burden every year. EVERY year.

The bottom line when one looks at the tax report is that everyone that pays income taxes received the benefits of the tax cuts. If you paid taxes, at the end of the day, you paid less after the Bush tax cuts than before.

Over at Pressing the Flesh “fleshy” writes:

Three things are clear, however: most Americans didn’t receive any real form of tax relief from Bush’s cherished tax cuts to begin with – those cuts only rewarded those with the highest incomes.

Hopefully you, dear students, have now learned that the assertion is false. The cuts rewarded everyone.

As always, I recommend you refer to the original source documents. Don’t trust the media, and don’t trust ax-grinding bloggers. Not even me.

Until next time…