Academic Technologies

• I also created a course blog, to which I asked the students to post a weekly question arising from their preparatory readings.

• I read the blog and del.icio.us site each week and used then as a basis for preparing the coming seminar – I hoped that this would mean I could make the seminars more relevant to the students’ interests and the independent work that they had been doing.

I used the social bookmarking site del.icio.us to get the students to record their reading and generate a dynamic list of online resources for the course.

1. Being one of the Learning Development and Research Associates at CILASS I wanted to try to get the students to engage in some sort of inquiry-based learning activity but not to overload them, given the amount of other work they were doing. This is where the blog came in – if inquiry based learning is all about questions I thought it was a good idea to ask the students to pose some of their own questions rather than me deciding what we would be doing each week.

2. Over the years, I’ve been increasingly struck by the futility of simply forbidding the students from using the internet or making dire warnings about sites like Wikipedia. From my personal experience it simply isn’t realistic and doesn’t work very often. I thought that if I could get the students to record the reading that they were doing on the internet then I would have a better chance of modifying their behaviours and actually understanding what they were using the internet for. Also, in simple pragmatic terms, by getting the students to record and share what they were doing, their work was not totally lost in the digital ether – they could return to it in future, as could their fellow students. This would hopefully develop the students’ digital information literacy skills. This is where del.icio.us came in.

I think it is also important to make the link with classroom activities stronger, especially in the case of del.icio.us, for example by thinking up some tasks that integrate it more strongly with face-to-face sessions (instead of just using it as a resource list to which they can refer in discussions if they want). I hope that this would promote active engagement with the resource and the topic.