Ethics, Wikipedia and the History Textbook

Wikipedia has now come far enough along that I am comfortable using its pages in place of a textbook, as I did for the first time last semester.

After the adventure that was failed hybrid classes, I now have another regular on-site class at San Elijo campus for fall: Early Western Civilization.

Unlike my Modern US History, my Modern West, and my History of England classes, this class:

• has no collection of Lisa lectures I can use to substitute for a textbook
• has not been taught online ever
• has recordings of a previous semester’s lectures with slides I’m not sure I want to use (example here)
• has always used a traditional textbook along with my own primary source book

Having requested a desk copy of the current edition of the previous textbook, I not only looked at it but used its test bank to create Aiken versions of all multiple-choice questions to prepare them for uploading into Moodle, which took several hours.

Even so I keep hesitating to adopt the textbook, thinking maybe I could instead take the transcripts from my slidecasts and write a small textbook this summer (eek!).

Then today I came across Wikipedia books, the idea that you can put together a book using Wikipedia articles you select. You can print as pdf or export as open doc. It turns out there are thousands of such books, made when Wikipedia users cobble together (or “curate”) the content.

It seems to me there are some considerations here as I contemplate the direction I have been and seem to be heading here. Naturally I turned first to some Twitter folks to make sure I wasn’t doing something unethical (the ethics seemed dicey to me – see below).

 

Considerations of the profession

Here’s where the dicey ethics come in.

Some very good historians collaborate on history textbooks. My mentor used to get dissed by his colleagues for spending so much time rewriting and revising the third of the undergrad text for which he was responsible. Monographs may be important to professional respect and moving the field forward, but for many university instructors it’s their textbook that pays the bills.

So if I use a Wikipedia textbook (and indeed, if I continue as I have begun, using my own lectures instead of a textbook for two of my classes), I am affecting the historical profession. Historians mostly have government or university jobs, and their money often comes from writing books, and instead of using those books I’m doing this. I do not think the AHA would approve at all.

Versus considerations of pedagogy

Many people think that textbooks are full of factual historical information, and we all remember having to memorize historical facts. But all history textbooks are innately interpretive — the authors and publishers pick and choose the topics, and the newer interpretations are integrated into the texts (which is why new editions are important).

The teaching of history has many levels, but at the college level the focus should be on analysis. To make full use of a textbook, students must analyze the perspective of the textbook itself. If one is using a published textbook, pedagogical approaches may include analyzing the text’s interpretation.

Historians make choices when they teach, since there is never enough time to cover everything. By “cover” I don’t mean what history teachers call “coverage” (making sure they talk about or assign reading for every era or topic in the chronological outline). I mean covering information about, and allowing students to practice:

• analyzing primary sources
• constructing historical theses
• analyzing perspectives on an event, era or topic
• researching historical topics
• understanding historiography (that is, the history of History)
• creating new paradigms

In a community college class, I can’t do them all, so my focus is on the first two – primary sources and historical theses. I also work on these skills within the context of students researching topics of interest to them. Since I am not using the textbook to analyze historiography or discuss the textbook’s interpretation (except occasionally), I only need it for facts and chronology. Such a factual framework can now be obtained in many places online, though of course each may be presented with its own interpretation.

Given this use, it is not necessary for my students to pay $125 for a textbook.

Trumped by consideration of usefulness

With Wikipedia Books I can put together the pages I assign, and they can get it printed on demand through Pediapress, though for a color book (do I even need color?) that’s a lag time of  15 business days. But I can export as pdf and students can download. I don’t need peer-vetted accuracy (we can talk about that in forums) or objectivity (none exists in the discipline anyway) for the uses I’m making of the information. Wikipedia’s legal policies allow this no problem (and thanks to Chris Lott for pointing me to them).

If I were able to get Pediapress books printed quickly enough (naw, I don’t need color), it would be good to have the 10% support the Wikipedia Foundation. If not, I could go with some ebook format or leave it as pdf. I can do what I do with my documents workbook – tell them to print it.

Some students will grouse, because they’d rather go to the bookstore on campus and pay $125, or use the price as an excuse not to buy a book. The first will eventually fade due to the Powers of Convenience, and the second it’s good to eliminate. Publishers will complain, but these are the same publishers that have created systems designed to trap rather than share, creating overpriced books with unnecessary features and PowerPoint lectures that can’t be dismantled, and “rented” textbooks that can’t be written in and the access to which disappears at the end of the class.

What publishers offer these days is comparable to the Lego sets to which I compare the LMS. Instead, Wikipedia provides a set of Legos I can put together how I like.

I only wonder now whether there’s a way for the historical profession to benefit from this instead of lose.