From Faculty Academy 2007 Wiki
“Twenty-First Century Entrances and Exits: Planning for the Crucial First and Last Weeks of the Web 2.0 Semester”
- Barbara Ganley, Middlebury College
It's one thing to understand why we need to integrate Web 2.0 practices into our teaching; it's another to do so gracefully and effectively within a semester system. How do we actually move into and then out of courses that take advantage of a full range of teaching and learning spaces, technologies and relationships? Do we start students out on course blogs and/or wikis the first day or do we start out in traditional reading and responding and move slowly into more innovative practices? How do we pull in RSS and tagging, multimedia composing and sharing? Do we take time to run technology workshops for our students? How much time? How and when do we weave in the core subject matter? How do we prepare our students for the freefall experience of the first weeks of this kind of classroom?
In this workshop we'll take a good look at the opening two weeks of our courses, exploring exercises that build a strong learning community based on reciprocal apprenticeships while introducing students to the kinds of technology they'll be using, and immersing them in the heart of our subject matter. We'll also consider the end of the semester and how we help students move beyond the confines of the course through self-evaluation, hypertext reflection, and an old Russian custom.
