August 15, 2008
Management Professor Uses 'Crowdsourcing' to Write Textbook
Charles Wankel is gathering hundreds of co-authors from around the world to write his latest textbook — 926 of them in 90 countries, to be exact.
Mr. Wankel is an associate professor of management at St. John’s University, in New York. Each of his co-authors, most of whom are also management professors, will write or edit a small portion of the final text, which is slated to be published by Routledge. They’re organizing the vast effort using a wiki that lets participants see and edit each other’s contributions.
Mr. Wankel is essentially asking the expected audience for the book to be part of its production, since he hopes that management professors around the world will end up using the text in their courses. He found his co-authors by searching social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn for members who were management professors — and of course he invited colleagues he had met over the years. The practice has been called “crowdsourcing,” a term coined by a Wired magazine writer to describe outsourcing a project to a large group using collaborative Internet technologies.
The authors are practicing what they teach, too: The book’s title is Management Through Collaboration: Teaming in a Networked World.
Chapter editors and others who devote significant amounts of time to the project will get a cut of the royalties, says Mr. Wankel. And the hope is that authors will do more than just write — they’ll be asked to submit test questions, case studies, and even supplementary video clips. “If each of us does a YouTube video interview with a manager where we live in the language where we are, we’ll have a 1,000 of them in 90 countries,” says Mr. Wankel. “It’s this kind of thing that the dinosaur books can’t compete with.” —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Friday August 15, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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Why even use a “traditional publisher”? Why not simply conceive of this effort as a wiki itself? We are still in the dark ages here…
— Jeff McNeill Aug 15, 04:56 PM #
In response to Jeff McNeil: there are many reasons why being a Routledge rather than self-published textbook is attractive. Making students pay you for a password to material you wrote, price and distribute might be ethically murky. In our model, most of the authors do not teach introductory management and do not benefit from adoptions of the book. Rather, royalties are distributed according to the effort they put into the project rather than the number of students at their school required to get the book. Although we are indeed using a Wikispaces wiki to produce the book, at least in many parts of the organizing and some of the writing parts, our final product will not be a wiki but firstly a 640-page paperback book. After that, we will work on other editions including digital ones. Using one of the world’s most respected academic publishers, their editors, their review processes, etc., provides a validation for the book that something like Wikipedia lacks. Things like citations of primary sources will be full and accurate. You ask if with this effort “we are still in the dark ages.” We are, of course, in transition to a future pedagogy of interactivity in learning where students have immensely more active roles and interfaces such as virtual worlds will be the norm. For now, professors are still useful in producing and facilitating the use of learning materials.
— Charles Wankel Aug 15, 05:44 PM #
Because Mr. Wankel would not receive royalties for a wiki that other people wrote.
— Adam Robinson Aug 15, 05:44 PM #
Response to Adam Robinson: Outside of what I will get, the coauthors in this project will share (according to the value of their contributions) royalties of 10 percent of the net revenues (which I understand might be 40 percent below the list price, which might be $99). I suspect all of the 926 of us in the project are not doing this for any anticipated money, though. It’s not how professors think.
— Charles Wankel Aug 15, 05:59 PM #
“…Plus c’est la meme chose!”
As I thought aboout the history and development of the Oxford English Dictionary, it seems to me that crowd sourcing is a long established habit that is now being given a trendy name.
The difference is that the web allows much wider (and further!) participation.
— Anne Zarinnia Aug 15, 07:26 PM #
I have worked for two large corporations in the past 24 years before entering academia. During my time with them I had several managers who “managed by committee”. I guess they’re calling that crowdsourcing now.
926 of them!
My God, this sounds like the punch line to a bad joke: How many management professors does it take to ….
News such as this, makes me want to reread Allan Bloom’s book, “The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students”.
— HL Morgan Aug 15, 10:44 PM #
Response to HL Morgan: Bloom’s aim was less at management than theories of literature and subject matter with low “utility”. As a “great books” man, he was not a fan of textbooks generally, of course. In 2008, his target would be Wikipedia (which embodies the sort of debasing democratization he decried) not “Management through Collaboration: Teaming in a Networked World” with its authoritative development.
— Charles Wankel Aug 16, 10:50 AM #
What I would have liked to read is an account of how the philosophy of the production of the book will be reflected in its content — its title appears to afford precisely such an opportunity. Dr Wankel’s comment on “interactivity of learning” — I would prefer “the collaborative nature of learning” — may also point to an interesting direction in the development of this “book” in the future.
— Fabian Fairweather Aug 16, 11:25 AM #
Response to Fabian Fairweather: The book indeed is planned to have the various topical areas of management refracted through the prism of “collaboration”. It is hoped that robust experiential virtual global team exercises and projects will support this too. With hundreds of thousands of students in the courses of our authors and millions in their institutions nearly everywhere, we might be able to link up the learners using this book with other learners in far-flung places in exciting and pedagogically robust projects.
— Charles Wankel Aug 16, 04:02 PM #
I love this as a model for textbook creation — let’s face it, most of us say we’d “like to write a textbook” when we really mean we’d like to write the two or three pages on our specialty and have the rest of the book competently edited. Of course, with 926 co-authors, I’m afraid Professor Wankel must be in for some editing headaches — but I wish him and Routledge good luck with it!
— W.L. Anderson Aug 18, 10:59 AM #
Response to W.L. Anderson: Though there is an immense amount to do, I am really having fun not headaches. It’s true that I’ve had to send along some “Thank you but your toast” missives, though. Routledge, based in London, is one of the world’s most reknown academic publishers. They are planning to spend more than seven months on development of the book after we provide the main text on April 15, 2009. They have appointed a talented development editor, Beth Renner based in New York, to put it all into clear, engaging, textbookese.
— Charles Wankel Aug 18, 11:33 AM #
“….the coauthors in this project will share (according to the value of their contributions) royalties….” Who determines the value of the various contributions of 926 different contributors?
— C. Baker Aug 18, 03:46 PM #
Response to C. Baker: I will develop shares, perhaps with a team enlisted for doing so, based on my observation of the project leaders and their reports of work of those on their teams.
— Charles Wankel Aug 18, 04:49 PM #
We are tentatively planning a specialized volume summarizing current research in our field with the idea that it might also be used as a textbook. In our case, ‘we’ are a group of ~10 environmental scientists and one computer scientist and the field is organic biogeochemistry. At the moment we plan electronic publication as pdf files under an open access license so that students could read online or have a hardcopy printed ‘on demand’. This keeps prices down and avoids the issue of royalties (there will be none, but no one actually makes money on specialized graduate texts anyway) and allows for periodic revisions of specific chapters (since some will become obsolete more quickly than others). However, for purposes of tenure and promotion and gauging ‘scholarly activity’, an academic publisher seems preferable to a simple website for distribution. Does anyone know of similar projects currently in press or in prep? How would your department evaluate chapter authorship in such an electronic publication?
— Steve Cabaniss Aug 18, 08:20 PM #
the concept is very interesting and needs creful evaluation. as there are so many professors each may bring his expertise and perhaps some biases!
the editing seems to be the most challenging part of the exercise.
— Dr.Rajendra Barve Sep 21, 04:16 AM #