As college professors, we are increasingly turning to open educational resources to combat the rising cost of textbooks and other proprietary materials. What began mostly as a reaction to textbook costs is fast becoming a movement that promises to change the dynamics of the instructor-text-student triad. Once we wean ourselves from the “three-channel universe” of the major educational publishing houses, we discover we have far more choices. We can create and curate unique sets of course readings drawn from open texts, from the public domain, and from institutional library databases students have already paid for through their tuition and fees.
As students acculturate themselves to higher education, an important developmental milestone is their achievement of critical distance and independence from received wisdom and pre-packaged texts. According to Ellen Lupton, in her book, D.I.Y: Design it Yourself, “Around the world, people are making things themselves in order to save money, to customize goods to suit their exact needs and interests, and to feel less dependent on the corporations that manufacture and distribute most of the products and media we consume.” Asking our students to participating alongside us in the ongoing process of building a body of readings can be a powerful way for us to encourage reflection about the contingency of knowledge production. We can model critical thinking by challenging our assumptions about textbooks and considering the implications of the tools and lenses we use in our everyday teaching lives.
--Miles McCrimmon
Professor of English
No comments:
Post a Comment