Via Kevin Hickey - a web 2.0 Advent calendar - http://www.rsc-yh.ac.uk/advent/  

More fun than chocolate! 

It's the season to worry over work done, work not done, and what is falsely presented as work; the new cheat-monster are the digital tools.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/classroom-ethics.html 

My solution is to make the assignment unusual enough that it's not likely to be found elsewhere, (which also makes it more interesting to look at / listen to) and to otherwise refuse to be a paranoid teacher.

Of course it helps that I have small classes and just under 150 students total. But maybe the way we've designed our educational system makes cheating feel more like gaming an impersonal system than lying to a respected teacher.

Just a thought during marking time;-> 

Next term I won't be teaching classes, and I'm ambivalent about that. I will have the time to read and write blog posts, to read books, to give lectures and workshops, to develop my educational web consultancy, JNthWEB, and, most of all, to write. But I won't have the learning that comes from my teaching tasks and my students' responses, questions, and assignments, and I will miss that.

Young People and the Web

In some ways, my students allow me to see where young people are now in terms of their use of the web. I both see, and hear in their stories, that messaging and texting are universal activities among them. And most have extensive social networks through MySpace and/or Facebook that allow them to keep in touch both actively (by friending and by writing directly to a friend) and passively (by looking at friends' posts and pictures). Music and celebrity gossip sites seem to be quite popular, and, of course, YouTube, is ubiquitous. (Alliteration intentional!) Everyone seems to know about Wikipedia too, but, at least in the classroom, students are very wary of talking about it until they know my attitude.

There is a strange dicotemy between what students know about the web for their own personal use and what they know for academic purposes. They know about Wikipedia, but they are also aware that many professors denigrate it. My personal take is that it is like any other encyclopedia, and should be used, like them, for basic definitions and starting points. No essay should rest totally or even majorly on an encyclopedia. And the 'streetsmart' students will use it to find useable links and book references and never mention Wikipedia at all. That is the tip of a profound iceberg, IMHO, around the academic use of the web.

Some of my students last term were in third year university, from a writing program and from an information technology program, yet a fairly large proportion of them appeared hesitant about using the web. Personally, I see the web as THE information technology that they will be using in their future professional and personal lives. Consequently, I see two reasons for professors using web applications in their teaching. Web applications are, I believe, academic tools, and learning/teaching tools.

The Web as a Learning/Teaching Tool

One of my students said, in one of his final blog posts, that he had learned the most in our course from the work of other students. I was delighted because that's why I have designed the course using a community blog and a wiki; I believe students learn from encountering many interpretations, rather than just the teacher's. Most courses are structured so that the student's assignment is responded to by the teacher only. Some students can find the teacher's comments confusing and take them personally, but when they see/hear other students' assignments, they have a context for understanding what the teacher expected.

Most of my university students had never used either a blog or a wiki (though some had encountered one or both of these in a different course). Because blogs and wikis are very easy to use, creating communal spaces where students can share thoughts and assignments is also very easy. These shared spaces change the classroom dynamic from student-under-teacher to students-among-peers, not removing the teacher as guide, but broadening her or his influence. The class can encounter each other's work, and some will 'get' what the teacher is saying not from the teacher directly, but from the collective response to what the teacher has explained and required. In this era of programs with a buffet of courses and classmates constantly changing, and with students acclimatized to online social networking, the blog and the wiki enlarge and deepen the classroom experience, creating a rich learning environment.

The Web as an Academic Tool

Outside of the use of the web to enhance the classroom experience, there is the web as a collection of academic tools. I continue to be surprised at what my students don't use on the web. Here is just a small example of what I mean.

Researching - What All Students Should Know

As a starting point - Wikipedia - http://www.wikipedia.org/

For online research

• Using Search Engines - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine
  
• Google Advanced Search - http://www.google.ca/advanced_search?hl=en
  
• Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com/
  
• 
• Google Scholar links into many institutional librarys' data bases, using Google Scholar Preferences -
  
• 

Composing - What All Students Should Know

• For Visual Thinkers - Thinkature - http://thinkature.com/
• The Process - http://jnthweb.pbwiki.com/AcademicPapers
  

Software Sources for Frugal Students

• OpenOffice - free Office Suite - http://www.openoffice.org/
  
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets - http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html
  
• Audacity - free sound editing software - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
  

Presentation - How to Create a Good Image

• http://jnthweb.pbwiki.com/AttractivePages
  

File Storage for Online Access

For photos and images

• Flickr - http://flickr.com/
  
• PhotoBucket - http://photobucket.com/
  

For free online file storage and/or sharing, sending links instead of using email attachments

• Box - http://www.box.net/
  
• QuickSharing - http://s9.quicksharing.com/
  

I see the above, or their equivalents, as basic tools for doing academic work, and as important to know and use as any specialized software. Some of the above I have stumbled across in my own web explorations, but some have come from students who had found them and shared.

Teachers should know these applications and use them routinely with students so they, too, will learn to use the web as the amazing communication tool that it is.

technorati tags:learning, web, web2.0, free, freeware, teaching

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Why Elgg.net is a Valuable Learning Tool

• It extends the classroom, in allowing asynchronous written connections among students and, consequently, aiding the construction of their understanding.
  
• It is also a good way for students to hand in assignment files, either through uploading the file to Elgg and attaching it to a blog post, or by uploading it to a site like QuickSharing or Box and linking to it from within a blog post.
  
• The use of personal icons makes identifying the person posting almost automatic so the conversation flows more naturally.
  
• Elgg provides a space that is a counterbalance to the teacher's dominance as an audience, where students can tell each other what they thought of their assignments, giving themselves a more complete audience awareness. (I require only positive comments, based on the psychological research that we humans are more likely to change our behavior in response to positive comments than negative ones. Besides, that's the teacher's responsibility.)
  

Twice now I have used an Elgg Community Blog as part of a class on Oral Rhetoric. Even the rather simple and limited way we use it adds immeasurably to the learning. Students rarely have any problems with Elgg, even though many have never blogged before.

Here are some comments (with a couple of non-meaning-changing edits) from my students -

Salma T.

What did I think of Elgg? 

I liked using Elgg, its simplicity, its functions such as the tags/keywords, that helped me find not only my previous postings and files, but also those of other users’.

I also liked receiving comments on my postings by other members in our community blog.

 

Only opportunity I can think of for Elgg is adding an email option to the page, in case you would like to email other users, or even a PM option will be nice to message other users on Elgg.

 

Overall the site is structured conveniently, especially for first time blog doers like myself.

Salma A.

I really enjoyed using Elgg. I actually didn’t know about it. But, Elgg is very user friendly. I didn’t have any trouble uploading, linking, or posting. It’s like sending an email, or using Microsoft.

Serena

Elgg is very user friendly. I consider myself technologically challenged and breezed through using it this semester (yaaay something i can use).

Diana

My post will be brief. I've worked a lot this past week, and I'm exhausted. I think Elgg has a lot of positive features. I like how easy it is to log in, much like wikkispaces ...

I did find the one problem, with checking comments on other people's posts an issue, because I had to either open it in a new window, or scroll back to the last comment each time I checked. I did however, appreciate the email notification for whenever someone commented on something I had written.

It would also be nice to have email notifications if someone responds to a comment you left, not on your own blog, but I still found this much cleaner, easier and more entertainig than CCNET.

School comparisons aside, ELGG is a great tool. I'd like some of the features used here to apply to livejournal, like the layout of the community blog feature.

All in all, I give ELG a 8.5/10

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You

• Dave Tosh
  
• Ben Werdmuller
• Misja Hoebe
  

technorati tags:Elgg, teaching, learning, Dave_Tosh, Ben_Werdmuller, Misja_Hoebe, students

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