I've come up with a scathingly brilliant idea, or at least interesting experiment: Create a textbook out of the Wikipedia entries for the different principles explained in an economics text. I'm thinking the format might be a paragraph or two explaining how the article fits in with the other material around it, then a link to the article, a problem set based on the information in it, and then some links to supplementary material like the original paper explaining this concept and links to Youtube videos of people teaching it or examples of it.
The interesting part, in my mind, is just how useful the wiki articles can be for teaching. A lot of the articles I've seen go into too much technical detail to be of much value in a principles text, but the nature of wiki's editing leaves it too open to inaccuracies to be comfortable as an advanced text. Maybe intermediate micro? Or it might just not work as a standalone text.
And how should I organize it and choose the topics? Actually, how does anyone organize and choose topics for a textbook? Is there a list somewhere? Right now I'm thinking of scavenging all the Half Price Books stores in the Cities for micro textbooks, creating a list from their tables of contents, and then basing the text on what they have in common plus what's interesting. Not sure that isn't plagiarism, though.
In any case, if I try this and get anywhere with it, it will certainly be a learning experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment