TCC08: Wikis and Blogs and Tags: Oh Why?

There's no place like homePresenters:

  • Alice Bedard-Voorhees, Colorado Mountain College, Glenwood Springs, Colorado, USA
  • Lisa Cheney-Steen, Colorado Community College System, Denver, Colorado, USA

Starting with an intro to Web 2.0

New tools pop up all the time

Why not just use the features in your LMS?

  • Information or Presentation
  • Social Connection
  • Collaboration

Categories overlap & aren’t clean distinctions

Information & Presentation

  • Blogs
  • Podcasts
  • Voicethread
  • Slideshare

“Information is not always text” This is a really important point

If it is text, a blog is good

In chat, Alan Selig pointed out that using tools outside the LMS is important b/c they’ll have them after they graduate.

  • Life is not a closed situation like an LMS
  • Show students what you are reading–demonstrate importance of material outside the classroom
  • Add “real world” content by bringing things in from outside (podcasts, blogs, etc.)

Audience is important!

Question about FERPA (student privacy law in the US)

  • Important to protect feedback and grades
  • They checked that moving student writing outside was OK
  • May have students use pseudonyms
  • Cynthia Calongne said for game-based rubrics she adds NPCs to disguise the real scores

Social Connection Tools

“Increased engagement = Opportunity for Increased Learning”

Engagement is the why for these tools

Information Literacy & Sharing Discoveries

  • delicious
  • Diigo
  • Twitter

Annotations on sites helps information literacy.

Diigo = “delicious on steroids” with more annotations or conversations, sticky notes. More social community.

Cynthia uses Twitter for keeping track of bookmarks–lets her tag it with who shared it with her and when to give her context

Collaboration Tools

  • Wikipedia
  • Kaltura–collaborative video editing
  • Google Docs
  • Diigo

Create a sharing community

Important to teach students collaborative skills to prepare for work

Teams are goal-directed

Wikis as classic example of collaborative tool

  • Gave an example of faculty handbook created with wiki (using MediaWiki)
  • Wikis make it very clear who did what–always a problem with group work for grading

Students learn how to judge the stability of information & collective intelligence through using a wiki

They get complaints that their website information is out of date but that the wiki information keeps changing. 🙂

Wikis have more work application for students too

Diigo

  • Set up a group
  • Have everyone in the group highlight and add sticky notes to discuss the content
  • Diigo’s dashboard has forums for discussion
  • Automatic notification available so instructors can keep track of discussion
  • Help connect learning in class to learning outside

How do you pronounce Diigo? Is it DEE-Go?

LMS is nice to have as a launching point so students have a home base

They have had good support from their administration.

If students are really uncomfortable sharing online, you need to make accomodations–one participant said he dropped a class b/c it required Blogger and he doesn’t like Google’s privacy policies

You need to set expectations for writing style–if you grade on grammar and tell them what is acceptable, they will write with an appropriate level of communication for that level. Ask students what they want to be remembered for–is it l33t speak?

Privacy issues: Edublogs may be better than Blogger, or do it on your own servers to control information.

Image: ‘Ruby Slippers by Peter Alexander
www.flickr.com/photos/14351900@N00/2128542926

Update: I switched the image for this–I didn’t realize that my original choice had graffiti over the picture; I was just seeing Dorothy and Toto.

Read the other liveblogged posts from this conference.

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