Collective development of wiki textbooks in teacher education

The last two years, I have been leading a project where we have tried to develop new textbooks in Norwegian Teacher Education through the use of wikis.

We developed two different wiki textbooks (“The Mentor Teacher” and “A guide for music teachers”). Both of these books are of quite high quality and people are currently working on improved versions of the books. We are also translating the book about mentoring into an English version which will hopefully be ready in June 2013. The wiki text permits flexible reuse because of special text license. 

This developmental work is intended to stimulate the development of a more transparent knowledge sharing environment at Østfold University College, but also far beyond this specific institution. This is the reason why it has been important to stimulate the development of sustainable communities that can continue to develop these textbooks. We have encouraged contributions from several different stakeholders such as experienced teacher educators, student teachers and teachers. In this way we try to challenging traditional production of textbooks and the notion of teachers and student teachers as only being “textbook consumers”.

The project is funded by Norway Opening Universities and started in 2011 and continue until spring 2014.

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