The second post is from Wired Campus at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it references a talk by Cole Camplese (someone I get to meet in a month) where he suggests ways that students might draw information from the Internet during class and bring that to the class discussion.  I know someone who does this regularly.  Anyone who has a laptop in class (and we’re a campus where laptop usage is fairly sparse) gets called on to look stuff up.  This means that they usually don’t have time to be in Facebook or on IM.  They have to be ready to respond.  The comments on the post are representative of the camps people tend to fall in: those that outright want to ban laptops and those that think professors should find a way to use them effectively.  I do think it’s okay to tell students to close their laptops for portions of the class; I’ve done this in my classes.  But I think one needs to treat students like the adults they are.  Maybe they’re taking notes, maybe they’re not.  This would be true without laptops.  I can remember writing letters home during some particularly boring lectures.  Most express a concern that the students are not concentrating, and that may indeed be true, but there may be ways to use laptops to help with concentration.  The wiki example above might help students focus.

One comment on the WC post really struck me as odd:

I teach in the sciences, like the two physics professors in the article. I agree completely with them. So do virtually all my peers… the only holdouts are the folks teaching the non-majors courses. There isn’t as much priority in teaching critical thinking, so those instructors can goof around a lot more.

There seemed to be a lot of assumptions going on in this.  First, that teachers teaching non-majors weren’t also teaching critical thinking.  I would guess, based on the science faculty I’ve talked to, that those teaching non-majors try harder to connect their subject to students’ lives, helping them see science at work in everything they do, or helping them understand and critique science as it gets reported in the news.  Also, the idea that figuring out effective ways to use technology is goofing around is particularly galling.  The easy way out is to ban them altogether, and in part, I don’t blame faculty for doing this.  It’s hard enough to teach without also figuring out what to do with this new element.  And that’s the conclusion I increasingly come to about using technology, whether it’s laptops in the classroom or a blog or a wiki.  Using these tools effectively requires a lot of creative thinking, a lot of work to set up, and a lot of retraining of students who are used to being lectured at, and that’s really hard work, not goofing around.

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• Has the Sage on the Stage Run Amok? Banning Technology in Class (languagelabunleashed.org)

I’m all for teaching “21st century skills,” whatever those are.  But I shy away from teaching specific tools.  I think the thing to do is to figure out what the underlying concepts and skills are and teach those with whatever tool makes sense.  Ten years from now, we might not be teaching about using Twitter, but we probably will be teaching about how to find and evaluate information via the Internet in a variety of ways.  One might use Twitter and Wikis and IM to teach collaboration and communication skills.  How do you communicate with your colleague about a project when they’re far away?  Or we might think about fun ways to teach content using these tools.  One criticism of the curriculum is that it’s sacrificing the teaching of certain historical periods.  How could you use blogs, wikis, and podcasts to teach that content instead of teaching blogs, wikis, and podcasts in and of themselves?  For one thing, it’s easier to learn these tools when there’s a specific application for using them and for another, the content might stick better if students are creating their own materials based on the content.  As Chris says, it’s quite possible that this is exactly the way schools will implement these tools, within a good context, but it’s hard to tell from the article.  And that leaves the curriculum open to criticism from folks who feel like things are getting constantly dumbed down.  I’d argue that it’s actually more challenging intellectually to create a podcast about a WWII battle (imagine having to created a fake newscast from the front) than it is to just read about it and listen to a lecture on the facts.  This doesn’t have to be a dumbing down if it’s done well–and therein lies the real challenge.

In Inside Higher Ed a little over a week ago, Robert Cummings writes a very interesting piece explaning how he uses Wikipedia for many of the same reasons I used blogs.  It’s an excellent explanation of his reasoning behind the Wikipedia assignments and of how, exactly, the assignment is laid out.  There are over 50 comments on the article, many of which are quite negative, revealing the tensions between those who are attempting to teach students how to navigate the networked environment, part of which is learning to share their work in public, and those who think the networked environment lacks quality and rigor.  That’s perhaps putting the tensions a little too simply, but I think that’s the gist of the situation.  In addition to helping students learn to write in different ways, there is the potential of these types of writing assignments will imbue the networked environment with more quality and rigor.  Further, as part of such assignments, students can learn what constitutes quality, rather than simply relying on their teachers to tell them what quality work is.

General–interesting things on Social Software in Education

• Michael Wesch from Academic Commons, Learning in New Media Environments (The whole issue is worth exploring)
• Clay Shirky on Tagging
• Mark Prensky (classic writing on digital natives, gaming, education, etc.)

Blogs

• Academic Blog Wiki
• Research Blogging
• Blog Software

Wiki Assignments

• Writing/Evaluation Assignment
• Wikipedia’s invitation to participate and ideas for assignments
• Wikiversity
• Educause: 7 Things You Should Know about Wikis
• Wikis in Plain English (video)

Social Bookmarking

• List of articles/resources on using social bookmarking

Images

• The Commons at Flickr
• FlickrVision

Social Networking

• Social Networking for Educators
• 25 Apps for Facebook for Educations

Gaming

• SLED
• Second Life vs. WoW for learning
• Language Learning in WoW