A small group of BCC faculty met today for the first session of this faculty learning group on teaching and new technologies. The discussion ranged through a number of topics, including
- Guest lecturers in class using webcams through the Internet
- Various types of flash drives and their usefulness
- Wikis as “project space” for students to work on group assignments (kudos to Lois C. for this)
- Use of blogs for journaling; impact of adding comments
- Twitter: how is it different from email and will it be around long?
- Email overload and its impacts: “ADD” culture
Next meeting, Oct 20, 1-2pm, will continue the exploration and have a brief demo if there is interest of the webcam setup. Comments welcome!!
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A comment re team wikis – these are gaining popularity in the business world for a couple of reasons – first, when collaborating on a document, there’s one and only one version; not multiple, out-of-syn versions floating around various email inboxes. Second, the ‘subscription’ feature replaces email ‘push’ with user-selected ‘pull’ – I get updated only on what’s important to me, and only when I want it (though some wikis lack the scheduling feature).
I would imagine that for educators, the page history feature would be useful as well – you can easily see who did what and when, and thereby get a better picture of who’s really contributing.
We’ve also found blogging to be very useful in mentoring relationships. The mentor not only blogs about what they’re doing, but about why as well, so the student gets a view into the thought process.
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Dwight, I think the points you make about wikis for higher ed are well-founded. Esp. the history feature can help a faculty member know how active each student was when working on a team project. Faculty often cite the lack of individual effort that is acknowledged within a team project as an impediment to using more teamwork. Since “teamwork” is one of the key skills that businesses are looking for when they hire, we would be serving our students well to get them used to these collaborative technologies.