Students today have access to more information than ever before. Beyond Google-fu and Wikipedia, new technologies allow anyone to research and order practically any publication with a few keystrokes. College students have access to expansive libraries filled with volumes on the most obscure topics, and at larger universities like DePaul, students can access full-text articles in respected academic journals with a few simple searches. The amount of information we students have access to before we ever reach a classroom or open up Blackboard can be overwhelming. It raises the question, given the wealth of information students have access to outside the classroom, what exactly is the role of the instructor?
Wikis are a great tool for collaborative learning, but like any other tool, they need to be used properly. In my role as wiki administrator/Mister Fix-It at SNL Online, I’ve recently checked up on several course wikis that I’d initially created and turned over to faculty and was disappointed to see some that were underused and poorly structured. Here are a few tips to make your wiki (or, ahem, workspace as PB Works, née PB Wiki, now calls wikis) easier to use and a better learning environment for you and your students.
My coworkers like to joke that an endorsement from me is the kiss of death to any Web 2.0 tool. It seems every time I turn around, some new tool I’ve recently tried is shutting down. Last year, I fell in love with Omnisio, a tool that allowed users to create compilations of YouTube video clips. Omnisio also had some basic editing features that let users trim out whatever they didn’t need from each clip, making it possible for instructors to assemble highly focused montages of useful video clips. Within a few weeks of the time I’d discovered Omnisio, Google bought the company. The Omnisio site currently states that its staff is thrilled to be using their skills to improve YouTube, but so far, Omnisio’s features are nowhere to be found.
VoiceThread and Camtasia are two of the many tools that we are introducing to faculty for online teaching. For those of you who don’t know about these tools, here is a quick intro.
VoiceThread is a tool that allows you to share images, audio, and presentations online and collect comments in the form of text and audio. See the demo below, which was created within Voicethread:
Camtasia is a tool that lets you record actions on your computer screen to create presentations or training videos. With Camtasia, you can produce a tutorial, a quick Web-based demo, or a narrated PowerPoint presentation.
Need an easy way to stay current in your field? Table-of-contents services are a great way to get the tables of contents of your favorite scholarly journals delivered to you via e-mail or RSS reader. A couple that you might want to explore include:
ticTOCS (Journal Table of Contents Service) – TicTOCS is a free resource that allows anyone to keep up to date with newly published scholarly material. The site is simple to use: just register for a free account where all of the tables of contents you choose will be permanently saved. Then, search for the titles of your favorite journals. You can then add them to your list and export them in a format that is easily imported into Google Reader. The site currently only has about a thousand titles, so your favorites may not be there.
Writers and urban planners for years have mapped and envisioned the ideal society through designing utopian metropolises. This is my own interpretation and glimpse into a version of a “webtopia,” a re-imagining meant as a prompt for discussing democracy and citizenship on the Web.
Oh the irony! Using the Internet to counteract computer-related health issues! Well, the reality is that for those of us constantly on the keyboard—faculty, students, and all other modern-day workers—discomfort in the hands, wrists, and arms is common. Eventually, discomfort can lead to more serious health issues, such as tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, and other repetitive strain injuries (RSI).
Check out this YouTube vodcast. Created by percussionist David Kuckhermann, it shows several very simple stretching exercises that can ease the discomfort and, hopefully, stave off those more serious conditions.
In working in online education, I find myself trying to keep abreast of not only the new developments in the online world, but also in what technologies students are currently using, both inside the classroom and out. A few years ago, I asked a group of students to teach me about Facebook, since it seemed to be all the rage and I knew nothing. I found that no student wanted to talk with me about it.
