Closing Thoughts

Experiencing the EDES 545 course with its newly minted Web 2.0 emphasis has really opened my eyes to the Web as a place where students can build and share their learning. I had previously treated the net primarily as a place to find information. Looking at each service very intentionally, from photo sharing to blogging, has made it clear that user created content is here for real.

Several of the Web 2.0 technologies stand out as “made for student use” to me. A couple of them (social networking and video sharing) didn’t seem to have as much potential, but in the end, I am glad to have examined everything carefully. The discussion and blog sharing really took things to a new level. I’ve mentioned this before, but having a group of educators really looking critically at Web tools on a weekly cycle yields a fantastic resource to draw upon. It is also a very rich experience to express ourselves with such flexible mediums. I have never felt like I knew the group this well during my previous course.

I was very concerned at the beginning of the course about producing regular blog entries. Writing is a painful process for me. Doing entries weekly really helped to get in a rhythm. I felt the most comfortable when there were things to actually try out (podcasting, photo sharing) and then reflect on afterward. Fortunately, our group brought a wide variety of strengths and perspectives to each topic. The blogs as a whole covered each topic wonderfully. I really enjoyed the discussion threads. There were times that I didn’t seem to have anything fresh to bring to the posts, and I did more lurking than writing.

The collaborative work (using a wiki) of presenting a research article was very fun, and not nearly as difficult as I had anticipated. Some of the things that Val and I discovered (on the gender gap) are going to stay with me for the duration of my teaching. The discussion afterward brought out even more implications of the paper. It is great to share with staff members about something like a wiki, having had some genuine experiences using one.

Many ideas have been shared. I wonder if there is an easy way to wrap all of the blogs into one resource that we could look back on? There is one downside to using virtual spaces to present our findings. The work can become digital dust. I am going to poke around Blogger to see about archiving things. Wordpress will likely have some mechanism to do this also.

A great big thanks to Jennifer for helping us find our way through this course, and thanks to the course members for putting so much thought into the writing.

posted by John Lobe @ 7:32 PM