Today I attended (virtually) Laura McGrath‘s presentation at SUNY Learning Network SOL Summit. Laura is Assistant Professor of English and English Department Tech Coordinator at Kennesaw State University, and her talk was “Innovative uses of technology for instructional purposes”. Since I will be presenting this summer at 2008 Online Teaching Conference on a very similar topic, I paid close attention!
A couple of key points she made were not intended to be the focus of her presentation, which demonstrated examples of technologies she uses. She showed how MySpace was used to hook up two classes at two different colleges across the country, and how tools like Diigo (for social bookmarking) and Twitter (for image annotation) could be useful in online classes.
Certainly one key point was that the paradigm of course management systems is not set up for “participatory learning”, collaborative, creative work on the part of students. I couldn’t agree more, and have written a Viewpoint piece for EDUCAUSE on exactly that issue.
Laura also mentioned that it would be nice if such technologies were available in CMSs, since otherwise students have too many different log-ons, and it’s hard to keep track of where they’re working. This makes me think it might be best for faculty to start with just one external technology, like Diigo for a research project or Flickr for art history annotations.
Another issue that kept coming up was how to help faculty, many of whom are not as into these web 2.0 technologies as our students. Play is important, and she said instructors really appreciate time and guidance in playing with the new technologies, what she called “serious play”. I’d like to provide more of that through the Program workshops, perhaps next fall.
Yes! Great idea! Group play where participants can lean over and share cool tricks with their neighbor as they discover them.