Blogs @ IWU

The office of Information Technology is now providing blogs for Illinois Wesleyan faculty, staff, and student organizations upon request. You can see the current list of active Illinois Wesleyan blogs here.

promoting active learning

I've found a few resources that might be helpful as our faculty try to select the right tool and context for integrating technology into courses:

• Academic blog portal - a huge collection of links to academic blogs, organized by discipline
• U of Tennessee's guide to academic blogging
• writingwiki.org's guide for teachers new to wikis

A vision of students today

Please forgive me if you've seen this video before...



This video was made at Kansas State. Do you think some of the survey results reported in the video describe our students?

Blog experience

So far my experiment with a blog in my 21st C. Techniques class has not been super. I get the assigned person to write most of the time, but even after repeated requests, the rest of the class is not responding. I'm open to suggestions.

New Zealand police and Wikis

Has anybody heard (read) about the attempt by the New Zealand police to revise their laws and regulations through a Wiki?
I just read a piece in a Spanish newspaper and I was wondering if there is an English version to share with this group. If you are interested I can give you the Spanish-language reference.
What would happen if the faculty were to propose a revision to the administrative structure of the school using a Wiki? How about designing a protocol for the curriculum review through a Wiki?
Precisely.

first experience with wiki not so great

Curious to know how others have done with wikis (wikies?). I created one for my introductory American government class and asked the students to use it to write mock court rulings. The students had a little over a week to do the assignment. They formed 4 groups, each responsible for the equivalent of 2 pages of text.

Two significant problems:

1) About 6 of the 27 students in the class didn't participate.

2) The hoped-for collaborative strength didn't materialize. The writings were choppy, and in a couple of the cases no one took the time to stitch together the various pieces that group members created. Punch-line: the entries read like a bunch of disjointed notes, not like a final document.

You can see the results for yourself (as if you have nothing else to do w/ your time) at iwu-americangovernment.wikispaces.com

open to suggestions --

Greg

Blog vs. Wiki?

Anyone have any thoughts about which pedagogical purposes are best served by a blog and which are best served by a wiki?

Wes Chapman