Wisconsin Union Blend

There’s lots of fun still to be had with the EduPunk meme that has been rocking the Edu-Blogosphere recently.

Myself, I’m looking forward to the development of EduPunk subgenres. As educators, should we head more in the NewWave.Edu direction? or get really experimental with Post-Edu Art-Punk?

I think my favorite EduPunk sub-genre will be PopPunkEdu. Perhaps that’s because, in many ways, EduPunk is already old-school. Where the excitement is, for me at least, is taking the “scrappy, DIY spirit” of EduPunk (as described by Leslie Brooks and Stephen Downes) and then scaling it up.

Just as pop punkers created albums that were “a cross between Abba and the Sex Pistols” (Wikipedia), EduPunkers (whether they identify as such or not) are taking their creative energy, their focus on effective pedagogy, and their insistence on authentic learning, and blending it all together to crank out some amazing work that is both DIY and, well, quite listenable.

Lafayette College’s SoapBox is totally Ramones. If that’s the case, Blogs at PSU must be pretty much Green Day. And I have to hope that the Collaborative Sites Platform will one day be at least somewhat Sublime.

It would be a shame if the larger discussion about EduPunk gets caught up in an EduPunk vs. Blackboard rant, or if the EduPunk philosophy gets characterized as something only accessible to first wave faculty.

Is that selling out? Maybe. But if the result is that we can help more instructors enthusiastically dive in and and create “hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests” (Leslie Brooks), then I’m all for it.

For more on EduPunk, see EduPunk on del.icio.us.

T&LS on Union Blend - Notes from the 2008 Teaching and Learning Symposium

Today’s panel session on Facilitating Collaborative and Group Projects wrapped up with a series of quick, two sentence tips from each of the panelists on facilitating collaborative work. Here are my notes on their rapidly delivered good advice:

• be explicit about the role of collaboration in your course
• be ready for your students to be even more diverse than you might think them to be at first
• find creative strategies to maintain independent accountability
• create collaborative exercises that are authentic to the discipline
• collaborative tasks must be challening enough to merit a collaborative effort (in other words, there needs to be a real reason for students to collaborate
• involve students in the development of the strategies, guidelines, and expectations around group work
• collect data from your students on what’s working and what’s not working
• make collaboration a primary and explicit goal of the course
• create the spaces for collaboration to happen - both the tools and the physical space
• assess students, through peer and self evaluation, on their collaborative process
• in addition to teaching students the discipline, train them on collaboration

Being open and direct with students about the goals of group collaboration was an important thread throughout the session. The panelists also stressed the importance of making self and peer assessments of the collaborative process itself an integral part of the project design.

Here are a few other key points from the session that stood out for me:

John Wright, Department of Chemistry, stressed the role student collaboration plays in helping students build the confidence they need to think about problems on their own. Wright explained that when students work collaboratively, their language around problem solving changes, and their confidence improves.

Rania Huntington, visiting Professor in East Asian Languages and Literature, and Sara Miller, from CALS, both emphasized how collaborative work can help put students in charge of their own learning. Huntington said that for her Garden of Searching for Dreams project, students “were the ones asking and answering questions.” Following on the thread, Miller explained that in her projects, students “are designing the day’s learning” and in doing so “they really test their own understanding.”

Constance Steinkuehler from the Department of Education spoke about how collaborative and collective learning happens in early education, and then again in graduate school, but often not enough in between. Steinkuehler pointed out that this gap is particularly problematic, given that “collaborative and collective work is such a big part of what we do in society.”

Steinkuehler went on to talk about how in online gaming environments, or “playspace’s” it is “prestigious to contribute to the collective intelligence.” So, too when tackling collaborative tasks. I like the idea of thinking about collaborative learning environments, like our Collaborative Sites, as intellectual “playspaces.”

If you attended the session - what were your take-aways? If not, what are your tips for effective design of collaborative learning tasks? Let us know in the comments!

Over the past couple of weeks, at the T&LS, at the TASI, and in consultations and conversations with faculty and staff around campus, people have been thinking and talking a lot about wikis and blogs, and wondering what these tools can do to support effective teaching and learning. In this post, I hope to pull together several discussions addressing the two most common questions people have been asking about wikis and blogs recently: What are they? And what’s the difference?

Quick definitions

A wiki is a website with an edit button on it (Frey). Most of the time, when you visit a website, your only option is to read it. On a wiki, however, you can edit both the content and the organization of the site directly, right from your web browser.

A blog is a website made up of a series of “posts,” organized with the newest information at the top of the page (Hourihan). Blogs often allow your readers to submit comments on each post.

Similarities

Wikis and blogs are often discussed in the same breath, and in some respects, they are similar. Both make web publishing fast and easy. Both are often associated with written text, but also facilitate easy publishing of pictures, movies, and animation as well. And from an educational perspective, both wikis and blogs are often used as platforms for authors to interact, negotiate, and hopefully, form communities that learn and build knowledge together.

Differences

There are many differences between these two tools, but the most salient for educators is that wikis and blogs each place authors in very different relationships with each other and with the text(s) they create.

In a wiki, the document is at the center of the authoring community. Since all of the authors can edit any of the other authors’ work, the text is owned by the community, rather than particular individuals. When used for collaborative writing, the success or failure of a wiki project often hinges on the ability of the authors to negotiate with each other and reach a consensus.

Blogs, by contrast, place authors at the center of their writing community. Authors contribute posts and get commentary and responses from other authors. Individual authors own their contributions. Other authors can make comments, but no one can edit anyone else’s work. In a blogging community, authors formulate opinions in their posts, and then defend and refine their positions as other authors post comments. Blogging projects succeed when students post formative ideas and then interact with other authors through comments and subsequent posts.

Another way to look at this difference is to think about the types of interactions you’re hoping your students will have. If you want your students to collaborate on a document, negotiate and form consensus, or build a shared collection of information, wikis might be the way to go.

On the other hand, if you’re hoping your students will formulate and defend their opinions, read and react to the writing of their peers, write outside the academic register, reflect on their learning, or write with or for an audience, you might look into a blogging project.

Just a start

My hope with this post is to put forth the beginnings of an answer, rather than a comprehensive one. For example, my discussion of wikis looks exclusively at collaborative writing and largely ignores the use of wikis for knowledge or research repositories. Currently, this is my “quick answer” to these questions, formed out of a number of interesting discussions over the past couple weeks. Hopefully, the discussions will continue here in comments and future posts!