Becoming a Millennial

211. Using a Wiki to Assess Student e-Portfolios

We have pulled off a significant initiative over the last few years in repurposing our course management system, Blackboard, to facilitate student e-portfolios.  The Blackboard Learning System has all the capabilities to organize and post artifacts, in a professional-looking format. 

This fall we figured out (actually, it was the brainchild of one of our education majors) how to use Blackboard's wiki tool for assessment purposes.  This is now in place for Education portfolios, and Social Work is working on something similar. It's a fun thing to come up with unintended applications for some of these digital tools. Click here to view a short video to see how this all works.

146. Wikinews and the 2007 Taylor Tech Fair

One of the booths at this coming Wednesday's 2007 Taylor Tech Fair is going to be a wiki-creation table. Students and faculty will be invited to sit down to several laptops and add their contributions to a wiki. 

The wiki tool I have chosen is Wikinews, one of Wikipedia's "sister projects".  You scroll down a ways on Wikipedia's home page and you'll see it (pictured above).  This tool enables the writing of news articles, wiki-style. 

I have started a Wikinews article with the title Taylor University Hosts 2007 Tech Fair.  The idea is for visitors to the booth to write the article for me, giving them hands-on experience contributing to a wiki.  We're also hoping to get some feedback on peoples' impressions of the fair. 

If you click on the above link to access the article you'll see the basic structure that I gave the article including the names of the various booths.  What happens to it on Wednesday?  Well, we'll see.

111. 4th Thursday Faculty Workshop

For the past three years we have scheduled each month a 4th Thursday "Successful Teaching" Workshop for our faculty, from 8-10 am.  It includes breakfast followed by a 90-minute workshop on technologies related to teaching & learning.
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This week's topics are:
1. Demo (Leon Amstutz) -- 66" SmartBoard installed in the newly rennovated Ayres Conference Room.
2. Demo (Rich Parker) -- Rich's fully online Blackboard course, "Music and World Cultures", loaded with multimedia content.
3. Discussion/Presentation (Gary Friesen, Jeremy Case) -- Blogs & Wikis for Classroom and Personal/Professional Use
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Samples of TU faculty blogs:
Win Corduan -- informal style ... frequent postings ... combination of personal, professional, devotional
Andy Rowell -- formal style ... less frequent postings ... professional, church leadership topics
Chris Bade -- using TU's MoveableType blog tool ... combination of personal, professional
Mark West -- using TU's MoveableType blog tool ... I don't know what it is -- it's all in French!

Examples of TU faculty using Blackboard Journal (essentially a blog):
Ron Benbow in his MAT 262 course -- you'll need a TU Bb login to access these courses
Jeremy Case in his IAS 110 course

Example of TU faculty using Blackboard Teams (essentially a wiki):
Jeremy Case in his IAS 495 course

Search sites that help you find blogs:
BlogPulse -- general seach
Technorati -- general search
CyberJournalist -- journalist blogs
eTalkingHead -- political blogs
Rhetorica -- professors who blog

Wikis to explore:
WikiUniversity -- hosts and develops free content for teachers
WikiBooks -- free open-content text books that you can edit
Wiki How -- the how-to manual that anyone can write or edit

Sample classroom assignment:
1. Create and maintain a blog using any free blog tool of your choice (or Bb Journal could be used)
2.  Select five "professional" blogs that you will read on a regular basis
3.  Create a daily entry in your blog commenting on the five blogs, including quotations, links, graphics when appropriate, and your own opinions and analysis

93. "Must" Read on Wikipedi

Comment posted by TU's Reference and Instructional Services Librarian:

Any discussion of Wikipedia can't be complete without looking at the recent article in the New Yorker:

KNOW IT ALL
by STACY SCHIFF
Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?
Issue of 2006-07-31
Posted 2006-07-24

http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/060731fa_fact

You will be surprised by what you discover if you take the time to read this article -- GF

87. Don't Write Off Wikipedia Too Quickly

"... Wikipedia knows more about Hinduism than most evangelical authors who write about the religion. Let's teach our sudents to start properly with Wikipedia rather than driving them away from it; they need to get an overview before they are able to delve into primary sources!" 

-- a comment posted by one of our senior faculty members who is a scholar and prolific writer.

70. TU Blackboard Has a Wiki

"Much of Web 2.0 is about harnessing the knowledge and work of many people to create something of value" -- Jim Rapoza, eWeek, July 10, 2006. 

A perfect example of this is Wikipedia.  The value of the website is due to the millions of people contributing to its content.  It is a group project on a massive scale. Another example is eBay, where the millions of sellers and buyers create its value.

Group projects are big in education today.  What often frustrates students is the difficulty in getting the group together.  Why not enable them to do some projects online using a wiki (which is one of the new Web 2.0 tools)? 

We just installed the Blackboard building block, Campus Pack, that has a module called Teams LX.  It is basically a wiki that facilitates collaborative student projects. A group of students can work together asynchronously on the same document, each one having full access to the editing tools.  It will be interesting to see creative ways in which our faculty take advantage of this tool in the coming school year.

56. The Threshold is Low

Here is further encouragement to those who may have been slow to get on board with technology; for whom Excel and PowerPoint are still applications that "everybody else is using".  The "Millennial Tools" are very easy to use. 

It's not like Excel where you really do need to sit in some workshops to learn the several dozen tricks to get a spreadsheet to work.  Once somebody points you in the right direction to get your blog started ... all you need to be able to do is type, browse for your picture (you can all do this because it is the same process as emailing an attachment), and click submit.  This might be a bit of an exaggeration in terms of simplicity, but not much.  Blogs, wikis, iTunes, Facebook are all really easy to use -- even for the non-Millennial.

To help Taylor faculty make this transition we've purchased from Learning Objects the Campus Pack modules that snap right into Blackboard.  There is a Journal (blog), Team (wiki), Search (allows for easy search of Bb content), and Expo (for external publishing of content).  Our Aug 21 & 22 "Technology for Teaching" Conference will include a couple sessions on the use of these tools.

54. Should Students Ever Cite Wikipedia?

The other day a friend forwarded to me this article, Wise Words on Wikipedia.  Professor Alan Liu, UC Santa Barbara, provides some guidelines as to when a student might appropriately cite Wikipedia.  The article is followed by sixteen instructive comments from teachers and librarians. See former posting about Wikipedia.

27. Your Students Are Going to Use Wikipedia

Here is an interesting article published
in The Chronicle of Higher Education
on the merits of Wikipedia, a resource
your students (if you're a teacher at
either the high school or college level)
will be using -- much like previous
generations used traditional encyclopedias.

The discussion following the article gives some interesting perspectives. Thanks, Lee, for pointing me to this.