XplanaZine

So what does QUIA have to do with models for digital scholarship? The ever-diligent Stephen Downes makes it clear that I need to explain more clearly what is at stake here, and in what ways the fragile digital objects of teachers are both similar to the objects produced by scholars but also different from them. As Stephen Downes commented: “Well, let’s not go overboard. I give my items a title, an authorship, and a date. That should be enough, shouldn’t it?” And yes, as a minimum for teachers and as a minimum for scholars, title, author, date are useful information.
But let’s look at a special feature of QUIA to see in what way the needs and possibilities of teachers are different from that of scholars. For those of you who have not used QUIA, it is an online service, free for students, minimal cost for instructors (used to be free!), that allows instructors to quickly create quizzes and games online. And there are lots of QUIA games and quizzes online. The website used to say how many hundreds of thousands of games were available - but I guess it’s like MacDonalds, they’ve stopped saying exactly how many games and quizzes there are available since the number is so astronomical. There are all kinds of nice features about the games at this site - one of my students in particular is perpetually delighted because whenever she completes a Latin vocabulary exercise correctly a penny comes falling down the screen and drops into an animated piggy bank. As a teacher, what I like best about QUIA is the fact that it will create four different activities (flash cards, matching, concentration, and word search) from a single list of paired items, and - new feature! - QUIA will even let me upload that list of pairs from a comma delimited file (in other words: straight out of my vocabulary spreadsheet!). QUIA’s Cloze exercises can also be adapted for a wide variety of language-teaching purposes.
And here’s the really radical feature of QUIA that caught me by surprise - you can freely copy other instructors’ activities. No questions asked. And you can then modify and adapt that copied activity for your own purposes. No questions asked. Now that is radical: and it suits the needs of a teacher perfectly.
Remember: the teacher’s needs are immediate. You just covered the future perfect tense in class today - your students have got to practice that tonight. And the teacher’s time is at a premium: convenience is everything. At QUIA, it is the teacher’s requirements that drive this system. Yes, of course, as a teacher you could manually copy, physically recreate, someone’s activity, typing it over again into your account - but how delightful to be able to take an existing activity, tweak it a little bit, and make it your own. The digital world makes this kind of copying and tweaking effortless - and QUIA takes full advantage of this digital opportunity, building a system that is focused on the teacher’s need for the immediate, convenient creation of content.
Yet you can see what a scholarly crisis this poses. In fact, when I have shown university instructors how the QUIA system works, I have purposely not shown them the copy feature, because I suspect that most of them would be absolutely indignant about this kind of wanton sharing. And it is very wanton! For example, in the space of 10 seconds at QUIA, I just created (by copying) an activity about “Cell Organelles”. It is now part of my Instructor account, and right there on the activity it says “Created by Laura Gibbs.” But I don’t even know what “Cell Organelles” are! (I could do the activity myself and learn, of course…). In fairness to QUIA, the default setting is to suppress the author’s name on any copied activity, but if the author’s name is displayed, it displays the name of the copycat author - there is no link whatsoever between the copied activity and its original author. Yes, QUIA is not very interested at all in protecting the author’s rights. QUIA is instead interested in getting information in motion, and spreading it to as many students as possible.
And that is something very very different from the way that models of digital scholarship usually operate. QUIA is a tool for digital teaching - but teaching and scholarship are often very different creatures indeed. Teaching is about the students, and the students’ success; teaching is not about the teacher. This is very different from scholarly activity, where the focus is (gulp) on the worthiness, the genius, the originality of the scholar. The scholar could fail in her quest if someone were to copy her materials and appropriate them. But for a teacher: so what? The students in my classroom don’t care if somebody took my “Cell Organelles” activity and published it under their name. Doesn’t matter at all! As long as my students still get access to the materials that they need, I don’t care who takes my teacherly stuff and uses it. And even puts their name on it. But scholarly stuff is something different: the authorship of scholarly materials does matter, for both intellectual and institutional reasons.
The question I would like to keep coming back to this week, however, is to what degree we should consider teaching materials as a subset of scholarly materials. In some ways, it makes sense to do just that - for example, as I discovered yesterday, Abby Smith’s article about New-Model Scholarship makes some excellent points that are certainly relevant to teachers who are publishing their teaching materials on the Internet. Yet as the QUIA site shows, there are also some points at which teaching materials can - and should - be managed and promoted and protected according to different assumptions than the assumptions we make about scholarly materials.
Is this a juggling act? It is indeed. I will come back and try to juggle some more on this topic tomorrow.