I’m attending a meeting this afternoon on campus as part of a discussion of emerging technologies and teaching. A few of us were given ten minutes to talk about what emerging technologies we use in our classes. I’ll be highlighting blogs and RSS (and a few other social technologies) for my segment. I’ll be using this post for the brief “show and tell.”
Blogs in the Classroom:
In 2004, Merriam Webster online announced the most-searched word of the year was blog and noted that one of the most talked about online innovations of Web 2.0 was the use of blog software to create easily updated, content-rich Web sites. The early definition the site provided offers insight into blogs’ genesis as a personal journaling tool:
Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999): a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.
Now blogs are used by institutions and university to disseminate information, encourage communication and conversation and enhance learning experiences.
Blogs for My Classes:
LIS701 Class Syllabus & Discussion Blog
LIS753 Class Syllabus & AnnouncementsBlog
LIS768 Class Syllabus (Under Construction for St Kate’s Spring 2008)
LIS768 Library School Toolbar Project
LIS768 University Library Social Network (Using Ning) (includes user blogs & feeds)
Student Blogs:
Blog as Information Tool for School Library
Blog as Student Reflection Tool Blog as presentation Tool (with embedded Powerpoint)
Other Dominican Blogs:
OChemOnline: Dr. Brent Friesen
All of these blogs use an open source software hosted application called WordPress. Editing a blog is done simply via a Web interface. For storing documents, WordPress offers 3GB of space free!
RSS Feeds, Portals & Aggregators
RSS is defined as XML-based metadata content from a blog or other source. Web content is created or published in one place to be displayed in other places, such as in RSS aggregators (also called “readers”).
Many students used Netvibes or GoogleReader to read class blogs and monitor other information sources.
Netvibes Screenshot
Using the social bookmarking site’s feeds, all students in LIS768 could contribute articles, Web sites and more to a group tag space: http://del.icio.us/tag/LIS768
A feed of this tag was placed on the class blog with a WordPress widget.
Other Tools Used in GSLIS:
Adobe Connect: “Scalable, interactive web conferencing and multiple personal meeting rooms for everyone across the enterprise.” Video, voice and more in chat environments can extend the online teaching experience.
Other Interesting Links:
University of Minnesota Library UThink: UThink blogs are available to the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota, and are intended to support teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression for the U of M community.
Lectures on iPods: Insightful post about students and class lectures on iPod.
YouTube Professors:”Web video opens a new form of public intellectualism to scholars looking to participate in an increasingly visual culture.”
Lecturer Bans Google: “How is that encouraging them to research and analyse? Quite frankly the idea of an academic banning anything is pretty poor in my book, and from the report, she clearly has little grasp on the situation. Surely it would be far better to encourage students to compare resources, to work with them to actually gain this ability to research and analyse?”
Laptop ownership increases among college students: “A new report from EDUCAUSE finds that nearly every college student in the US owns both a computer and a phone; 36 percent of students own two computers.”