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.

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

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…

Spreadsheets in Education is an open-access journal hosted by Bond University in Australia that explores the role that spreadsheets can play in education. Three years of content are now available. Of particular interest to many faculty will be the regular features focusing on using spreadsheets in the classroom. A recent example is an article entitled Quick Correct: A Method to Automatically Evaluate Student Work in MS Excel Spreadsheets by Laura R. Wetzel and Peter J. Whicker. Worth a look…

While this isn’t exactly about teaching and learning in the traditional sense, conference blogs provide an important resource for staying up-to-date on the latest information in your field. At our Virtual Citizenship conference for instance, WSU faculty member Kevin Deegan-Krause did an impressive job covering both the speakers and audience participation. Just in case you are going to a conference and want to try blogging about it, or if you are hosting an event and want to encourage blog coverage, you may want to have a look at this idea-packed 6-page booklet presenting Tips for Conference Bloggers developed by Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani. Here’s the direct link to the  PDF.

Join us this Thursday, January 3rd for a workshop on Blogs and Wikis in Academia. We will explore the use of these tools in academic contexts. UPDATE: Slides from the session now available  http://www.slideshare.net/warters/blogs-and-wikis-in-academia/ 

Here are the details:

• Thursday, January 3rd
• 1:30 – 3:30 pm
• 150 Purdy Kresge Library
• (TRC Instruction Lab)

Northern Illinois University has done a nice job creating a podcast called Teaching with Blackboard that is actually served up using a Blackboard building block. Fifteen episodes are available so far and they cover a range of topics that will interest faculty who use Blackboard to enhance their instruction. Topics have included strategies for moving your course online, use of classroom clickers, embedding RSS news feeds in your course, creating podcasts, and more. Incidentally, Jason Rhode, mentioned in my previous post, is at the center of this project. Nice going Jason!