WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

A great collection of writing about wikis in the higher education context is available online as a wiki (no surprise there, eh?). It is entitled The Wild Wild Wiki/Wiki Writing: Collaborative Learning in the College Classroom. Perhaps more interesting is the news that the University of Michigan press will be turning the collection into a book. Here’s the contents you can read online.

Volume Introduction “WhatWas a Wiki, and Why Do I Care? A Short and Usable History of Wikis”
Wikis and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
- “Wikis in the Classroom: A Taxonomy”
- “Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics, and Ethical Collaborations”
- “Building Learning Communities with Wikis”
- “Content and Commentary: Parallel Structures of Organization and Interaction on Wikis”
Wikis in Composition and Communication
- “Disrupting Intellectual Property: Collaboration and Resistance in Wikis”
- “Wiki Lore and Politics in the Classroom”
- “An (Old) First-Timer’s Learning Curve: Curiosity, Trial, Resistance, and Accommodation”
- “Above and Below the Double Line: Refactoring and that Old-Time Revision”
- “Success Through Simplicity: On Developmental Writing and Community of Inquiry.”
- “Wiki as Textshop: Constructing Knowledge in the Electronic Classroom”
Wikis and the Higher Education Classroom
- “Is there a Wiki in this Class? Wikibooks and the Future of Higher Education”
- “Agency and Accountability: The Paradoxes of Wiki Discourse”
- “One Wiki, Two Classrooms”
- “Glossa Technologia: Anatomy of a Wiki-Based Annotated Bibliography”

While you or may not be library staff, you might still appreciate an opportunity to participate in a self-paced exploration of some of the cool features of Web 2.0. It could be the perfect summer learning task. The tutorial, developed by the California School Library Association, provides 23 Things for you to do. Each Thing will show you one more web tool. There are many places for you to explore, experiment with, and think about creative ways to use this in your own work. If you are interested, visit http://schoollibrarylearning2.blogspot.com/ and get started exploring.

The  Pearson Foundation Digital Arts Alliance has produced a thought-provoking video on the direction that our education system needs to be moving in. You can check it out on YouTube. (thanks to Anne-Marie for the link)

This year’s workshop on Harnessing the Interactive Web held during Xtreme week was fun. Attached are the slides (2.9 MB pdf) from the session. Thanks to all who participated. 

Yesterday I presented a campus workshop entitled “Empowering Educational Resources: Moving from a Culture of Control and Containment to One of Sharing and Reuse”  The description I cooked up is as follows:”This multi-media session will provide a review of an growing shift by academic and civic organizations toward promoting open-access, reusable learning materials. We’ll look at the activity of several large foundations committed to promoting open educational resources and take a tour of a collection of fascinating new tools designed to help users create, locate, annotate, collate, rate, repurpose and exhibit digital resources for learning. And the good news is that the bulk of these tools are free and open-source…”      The slides from the session (all 75+ of them!) have been posted online at slideshare.net

Topsy Smalley, a librarian at Cabrillo College in California, has collected an interesting set of links on information competency for students. Targeted at California college-level information, the site also includes links to the major information literacy links from associations like the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL); ongoing projects in information competency; and links to college-specific information literacy initiatives. Seems like digital literacy has become essential. The question is, what are we doing in our work to keep up-to-date, and to help our students demonstrate these core skills in action?

The free online service known as TouchGraph lets you take an idea or web address and visually explore the universe of related websites or concepts using a java-based graphical browser.  Three tools are now available, one that draws on content provided by Google, one that shows relationships within Amazon’s catalog of books, music and videos, and the newest browser which lets you explore connections within Facebook. I did a quick TouchGraph using the Google Browser and the Inside Higher Ed website URL. Below is a clip from the results. You can filter or expand results and change the display type to focus your graph. Definitely an interesting tool that gets better with each revision. 

Alan Levine, one of the better known digital pioneers in higher education, put together a great tour of 50 different tools that can be used to tell a narrative tale with pictures and more online. A narrated slideshow walks you through them, and a wiki points you to the sources discussed. Very interesting…

Last week, UNESCO released a report (authored by Susan D’Antoni) entitled Open Educational Resources: The way forward (.pdf). A wiki version is available as well. George Siemens from the University of Manitoba has put together a short online presentation (using Articulate) that summarizes key points from the report. It’s a good way to get up to speed on some of the current buzz on OER’s.  

As one possible indication of the sea change we’re headed for, Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences has just adopted a policy that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online, making it the first U.S. university to do so. Here’s a link to more details.

For those of you who haven’t heard, we’ve got many exciting speakers lined up at the OTL. Your own colleagues will be presenting their ideas and innovative approaches to teaching. This Friday, February 1, Dr. Tim Spannaus will discuss Simulations for Classroom Use and next Tuesday, February 5, Dr. Mame Jackson will talk about Opening Doors Between the Classroom and Community.

We’ve also got other speakers lined up for the rest of the semester. Topics include: Thoughts on How to be Both Rigorous and Flexible in the Classroom, Today’s Student: Deciphering What’s Real, and more. Click here for a complete list of Winter semester faculty speakers.