WSU Teaching & Learning Blog

I’m looking forward to participating in our WSU symposium on Virtual Citizenship (aka “virship”) happening tomorrow, November 30th starting at 9:00AM in the Bernath Auditorium. You can view the days events streaming live from within SecondLife or on the symposium website’s streaming video page. The symposium will launch a broader research, teaching, and service project that can help us understand what citizenship means in the 21st century and can help our students, staff and faculty use emerging communication and information technologies to become better citizens.Speakers include:

• Russell Dalton, Professor of Political Science at the University of California Irvine, whose recent study called The Good Citizen looks at the attitudes and behaviors of young people
• Fred Stutzman, graduate researcher at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, whose research and active blog outline both the theoretical and practical aspects of social network software and its role in academic and political life.
• Wendy Chun, Associate Professor of Media and Modern Culture at Brown University, who will be talking about “Imagined Networks”.
• Vernor Vinge, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at San Diego State University and award-winning science fiction writer, whose recent Rainbows End is insightful in its thinking about how ubiquitous computing might affect everyday life.

The real estate and ability to stream media within Second Life graciously provided by the New Media Consortium. Live stream coordinates: 135, 124, 22. Join us if you can!

BibMe is a relatively new web-based tool designed to simplify the creation of citation lists in MLA, Chicago, Turabian or APA formats. The online tool features “auto-completion” of books and articles you can find via their quick search tool, so adding many items is quick work if you know what you are looking for.  You do have to create an account, but it is quickly done, with no need to go and retrieve an email from them before you get started (a common requirement these days). You can save up to 10 working bibliographies. 

When you are ready you can export a created bibliography as a rtf file for use in Word or other word processing tools. While the tool is really easy to use, it doesn’t try to match the power of desktop applications like Endnotes (available at not cost to WSU students and faculty). For instance, it doesn’t have a format to enter and save individually authored chapters in edited books. However, if you are looking for a way to create a quick list of works cited, BibMe is definitely worth a look.
    

I think our OTL workshop on Blogs and Wikis in Academia went well today. We had a good turn-out. I would have liked to give people a bit more hands-on experience with posting and tagging blog entries, but my timing was thrown off a bit by the movies that were shown. Good stuff, but I need to account for it in the planning.

Our two lucky winners of PBWiki Gold accounts were our own Annette Feravich and Law School Librarian Anne Cottongim.

I’m attaching the handout from the session. The file is a 1.5 MB pdf, so be ready for a sizeable download.

Here’s some links of special interest from the session;
Writingwiki.org - Advice on using wikis in college writing

The Academic Blog Portal (listing of scholarly blogs)

Higher Ed Blog Conference - ie HigherEdBlogCon

Directory of topical Blog “Carnivals”

Free blogs for Educators at EduBlogs.org

Introduction to Blogging in Academia from UT Knoxville

Technorati State of the Blogosphere Reports (shows growth of blogs over time)

Students known as “digital natives” are now commonplace in our classrooms. They have always had the internet as a tool and are used to trying new technologies and multitasking is common. This YouTube video entitled Academia 2.0 (a play on the Web 2.0 concept) was produced by folks at Kansas State University to explore some of the implications for teaching and learning. Definitely worth a look.