Community 2.0 - 0 views
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It is not so difficult to use technology to deliver instruction, but a bit challenging to use it to teach a concept.
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Priscilla Stadler on 29 Jan 13Yellow = faculty learning Pink = examples of connecting students
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The benefits for students were anecdotal but nonetheless strong from the very first time I connected a composition class with another composition class—I believe the very first was my ENG 101 with an ENG 099 Ximena was teaching. Students saw the process of offering feedback to another set of students, people who were not in the class, as an authentic, meaningful experience serving real needs. Peer review within the classroom could not compare to connecting with another person whose blog and personalization of it revealed a character yet unexplored. There was no mystery in looking at a classmate’s paper any more than there was in their looking at their own—they were all hoops to jump through set by the professor. For reasons I do not pretend to fully understand, the same text posted somewhere as a blog entry produces different reactions. Maybe we (or the students’ generation for certain) live in an era where such online identities are real identities—it is of little importance for my exploration. What did matter was that in that interaction students produced feedback far better, in quality and quantity, than they did in the confines of the single traditional classroom.
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One semester I taught a particularly unruly liberal arts cluster using blogger and these kinds of interactions. There were many moans and groans which frequently had me question whether the class was indeed benefitting in a way worth all the trouble; a couple of semesters later, I had two of the same students in my ENG 102 class. Because it was a Fall II class and I wanted the short session to be different anyway, I conducted that class with no 2.0 tools. At the end of the first week, one of the students from the previous semester came to my office and asked “what happened to the blogs.” I responded that given the complaints, I would have thought nobody missed them. His response pointed to an aspect I had never even considered. He told me that when he wrote in the blog and he knew that others would read it and respond to it, he never felt like it was a lonely homework endeavor in which he was engaged. Thus began my own shift in focus.
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