Appropriately enough, Wikipedia has a page that includes a comparison chart for various wiki "farms"–from those that are paid services to those that are free (usually ad-supported). This is probably the easiest option for a first crack at using a wiki for a course insofar as it requires no institutional support at all. Check out this page for more information.
Setting the tone in the blog vs. the classroom
As I consider using blogs in my own classroom, I wonder how blogging will change students' preceptions of my role. Sure, I'm in control of my tone in the blog, but I wonder how to control that tone–will I elivate my speech? As you can tell, prefer to use an informal tone in the classroom: silly voices and gestures. Yet in e-mails to my students, I tend to raise my prose. I wonder if they would notice the difference. Either way, my goal is often to make the classroom more approachable while making writing more thoughtful and careful. Any thoughts?
Hopes for the Future–after the workshop
If you’ve found your way to the blog, then the Summer Workshop is almost over. Yet the challenges of technology grow rather than diminish now that you’ve got your feet wet. Consider checking back here to share your ideas, experiences, etc. as you use the various applications to set up your course. We’ll be checking back, too. Technology can extend boundries and I hope it extends the life of this workshop.
Some interesting reading and resources
I just thought I'd share a couple of useful tidbits with you all here via the blog. First, I'd like to highly recommend this piece–Technology as Epistemology–by Peter Schilling, the IT director at Amherst. It's a provocative essay, and you may find that you disagree, but it's useful as an entry point into this huge and important conversation about just how technology affects not only learning, but the processes of thought and knowledge creation themselves. I'd love to hear what you all think (feel free to post separately or as comments if you want to conduct this conversation here). (more…)
How to use tools without endorsing brands?
One issue that I don't think we probably talk about enough when it comes to using technology for educational purposes is what the effect is of asking students to use particular software packages, especially commercial software packages? When we choose textbooks, I suppose that we don't worry about the "brand" behind them so much as we worry about the content of the books themselves. I hope this is the case when we decide on what software to use.
I'm not, however, sure that this is the case insofar as many of our decisions are made for us by the institutions in which we are working. For example, the fact that we are conducting our workshops in the Arc lab means that we do not effectively have the option of using, for example, Firefox as our web browser or OpenOffice as our office suite.
Is there an ethics to asking (or not asking) students to use PowerPoint? Are we willing to avoid commercial software altogether and rely on less ubiquitous and (sometimes) less-supported open-source software? (more…)
selecting a website example for learning/teaching styles
Hi Ryan,I was just trying to figure out which website I wanted to discuss as a part of the "learning/teaching styles" segment. At first, I thought this site on urban development might be a great exampel for visual learning and collaboration, since the main focus is displaying the materials created from each student group.It's one of the examples from the list from Day 1 under "Teaching/Learning Activities: What do you want to use technology for?" It's under Collaborative learning,Visions for a Sustainable City.
As I looked at the site, it seems to be a better candidate for a thought experiment in which we suggest how it might be improved by using the various other technical elements we're going to talk about during the workshop. For example, we get to see the finished produce (drawings, mostly) of each of the groups in the class. But it's mostly pictures. Imagine a blog in which we could see the thoughts developing–students hashing out the focus of each poster. Or if there were a collaborative group document so we could see who contributed what idea. This site seems more exciting for what this 1995 site could be more than ten years later. What do you think?
