The readings this week challenged us to think about ways to design assignments using technology in ways that are interactive, reflective, discursive, and socially oriented. In considering ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, it is above all important not to lose sight of the people who are supposed to benefit from being a part of the classroom. Not to be used as a mechanism for transmitting information, technology in the classroom rather serves as means of supporting learning through collaboration, communication, sharing of ideas, fostering a community.
The examples of final projects from the Macaualay Honors College Encyclopedia show how successful the use of websites can be in the serving as a platform for presenting information from research. A collection of websites under the title “People of New York City” shows various communities within the city, each focusing on the people, culture, and history of a specific neighborhood. In developing the projects, students practiced the skills of ethnography and created the content to show dimensions of the neighborhood. The project is so inherently “people-focused” that the final products appear to be a representation of community itself. While trying to get a sense for the Macaualay Springboard site, it seems also to serve the function of supporting the initial development of different project ideas and to communicate, collect feedback, and generally reflect on the progress of projects. It is essentially a place to bring multiple ideas together.
Though perhaps considered more formal in their presentation, scholarly journals serve a similar purpose. Journals provide salient information to a community who share similar academic or intellectual interests. Online open access journals make the sharing of such information possible, and more recently, have even provided means by which community members can become more involved in the review and editing process. The article about the work of Dr. Adrienne Brundage illustrates this nicely, and shows how assignments can be structured to give students the opportunity to learn about the publishing first-hand and in so doing, learn about what is effective for scientific writing.
In thinking about how to actually orchestrate the interaction within the classroom to teach complex concepts of media, or the learning of any material that could be better facilitated through peer-interaction, Dr. Jade Davis shows how to use a system of “speed dating” to help students generate ideas and come up with a project proposal. Since many technologies can be used to broadcast information widely, it seems now more important than ever to be able to gauge the interests and needs of the community that the knowledge you seek to convey can best serve. This dispersive model of one-to-one collaboration seems like a quick and very engaging activity that allows the students to collect different ideas and settle on the ones that work best for them and their overall project goal. The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy present other assignment and project ideas. While many of the projects are specific to certain subject areas, the way that different games and other forms of media are incorporated into the lesson could be applied across a broad range of disciplines. In looking over the assignments, I became interested in the one proposed by Laura Tabor titled “Pre-Research to Create Exigence for Public Argument Essays,” which seems particularly relevant given that we are in an election year and could stimulate an interest among students the discussions that surround political debates.
In addition to incorporating online resources into the classroom, as we may already know, we can also bring the classroom online. Konieczny discusses the resources and general feasibility of designing lessons using Wikipedia and stresses some of the technicalities of using it as a resource both for teaching writing and about online communities. The article is practically a “how to” for novice users of Wikipedia who aspire to incorporate it into their lessons. Barton also discusses the use of Wikipedia as a tool for teaching and learning, with particular emphasis on how it is a community of users and has certain norms of etiquette to prevent the “tragedy of the commons” or the selfish destruction of the information and the medium.
Motivation
- In reflecting on the readings, were there any other common elements that you say pervasive through the different assignments that were presented?
- In developing your Wikipedia assignment, did you consider some of the issues that Konieczny and Barton mention in their articles on the online open-access, open-editor encyclopedia? Were there any things that you wish you had considered before planning your assignment? Is there anything that you would change about the assignments at this point?
Teresa,
Thanks for the great questions and summary. The student projects on display in the materials this week really were, as you said, “interactive, reflective, discursive, and socially oriented.” Another common element I discovered while looking at them, was the intentional correspondence between the medium and the course content / objectives of the projects. The Peopling of New York projects were uniquely suited to group websites, as they could take advantage of the visual, auditory, organizational capacities of the medium to portray the multiple facets of the students’ stories and research about the communities. Whereas, the objectives of projects incorporating wikis were more about digesting complex course content and learning proper citation, etc, and the project where students produced a journal helped students work on their writing by engaging in a peer-reviewed writing process. The projects on Atwood’s book engaged with the author’s books multimodally, emphasizing a creative writing and composition approach — the song that accompanied that youtube video was beautiful and so evocative. If that doesn’t demonstrate deep and impactful learning, I don’t know what does!
All of these projects really are inspiring for me, as I think about my course for next year. It’s hard not to see all of this and want to bite off more than I can chew. I like how Davis scaffolded her students’ processes, leaving topic selection and medium open enough to foster interest, while still supporting them.
Sara
Sara,
Thank you for posting a response! In reading over your summary of the assignments, I had to return to a few of them. I especially like how you pointed out the “visual, auditory, and organizational” aspects of using websites to present the information from research. The use of multiple modalities seems to be a common feature in each of the assignments and finished products.
I just want to chime in on this thread — hearing more about the doctors Brundage’s projects and course design made me think more about the creative aspect of scholarship. What knowledge are we creating and asking our students to create, and how does it serve their goals and desires simultaneously? I was feeling very sad for poor research papers. Perhaps it’s not that there is no place or nothing to be learned from research papers, but that the form is something else. I was thrilled to take last night’s workshop in the direction that made the learning feel most productive, and collaborative creativity can do just that.