I spent Thursday and Friday this week at the HELIX (Higher Education Education Information eXchange) conference. The K-12 Connections Conference always runs concurrent with the HELIX conference and several of the sessions are open to attendees from both conference. The keynote speakers both days really provoked a lot of thought. Thursday morning's topic was "A New Generation of Learning." Dr. Mark Milliron discussed the topics of:

• The mix of millennials, gen-xers, and baby boomers teaching and learning together


• Blended learning


• Mobile devices


• Gaming


• Social networking


• Impact presentation technologies


• Analytics

Dr. Dwight W. Allen from Old Dominion University discussed the topic of "WikiTexts" the textbooks of the future. Dr. Allen has his students create their textbook for his "Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education" course at Old Dominion. The chapters are chosen by Dr. Allen with the option of additional chapters proposed by the students. His premise is that "Anyone can become informed enough in three weeks to write 1000 words on any topic." He even takes this as low as middle school students and perhaps as low as 3rd graders if the topic is elementary enough and the length of the paper is shortened according to the age and maturity of the students.

The students choose which chapter they will work on. Each chaper will have three separate submissions by different students. The submissions are peer reviewed and the submission receiving the highest score is included in the text. After the first semester using Wikitext creation, Dr. Allen no longer evaluated the submissions himself. His research indicated that the peer ratings were essentially the same as his instructor rating. (60 fewer 1000 word essays to score!!!). You can the view different versions of the WikiTexts at en.wikibooks.org

Another interesting finding was that the WikiText was actually read by the students!http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Social_and_Cultural_Foundations_of_American_Education.! Self-reporting by students indicated that students spent significantly more time reading the text. Some students from earlier classes indicated that they never opened the paper-based textbook. For those still questioning if volunteers can be trusted to compose and compile a reliable text, Dr. Allen directed them to the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) compiled by volunteers over several years, one of the main contributors being a "mad-man" who had been convicted of murder and submitted his work from his prison cell.