College students & their love for Wikipedia

http://www.dailyillini.com/blogs/on-the-town/2010/03/29/wikipedia-secret-to-college-success talks about how Wikipedia can be the college student's best friend.

I think that this points out that instructors too often take polar extremes when talking about information resources ("microfilm is GOOD" "Internet is BAD"), when we need to talk to our students more about the subtleties of information resources.

For instance, we all have friends that are very good at suggesting movies that we will like, and other friends that are good at suggesting restaurants. But the movie critic is not good at food suggestions, and vice-versa. And you wouldn't take relationship advice from either one of them.

So, Wikipedia is probably unsurpassed in, as this student points out, "Dwight Shrute’s co-worker relations, or if any progress has been made on the “Friends” film idea or the schedule for the first 48 matches of the 2010 FIFA World Cup."

And it may even, as the student points out, do a passable job of explaining the French Revolution in quick and dirty terms. The journal Nature has reported on Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Wikipedia held its own versus Britannica.

So, if you are talking to students about Wikipedia, let's stop saying "don't use it" and start saying "don't STOP at Wikipedia - take what you got there and explore further".

Social Media in Psychology

Three psychology professors from Emerson talk about how they have used social media at EDUCAUSE.

http://www.educause.edu/Resources/SocialMediaforAcademicPurposes/201748

Competencies for the new web

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/10_competencies_for_every_graduate

(cutting to the chase, more in the link above)

I'm going to shamelessly steal from Mindy McAdams, a professor in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida, and her "Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency".http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/2009/now-printable-reporters-guide-to-multimedia-proficiency/ I'll share my favorite 10, modified somewhat from the original list.

Grading discussions in Blackboard

Ben Worth, Greg Rickert and others shared easier ways to grade discussions.

Rather than grade each discussion entry as you read them from the discussion board, print out a roster, and make notes on paper, then enter all the grades at the end.

If you do it from inside the discussion board, you have to remember to hit "submit" at just the right time (or something like that)

More from Online Support Group

Next meeting Apr 21, we will think about demonstrating:

Jing - Greg Rickert
Slideshare - Cindy Tucker(?)
Google Docs - Steve
Audacity -
Voice Tools -
Web Cam -
(moving over a course in Blackboard, maybe some other "basics")

At Online Support Group Meeting

Ben Worth shared several things. Discussion of when the Blackboard upgrade should be installed. We may ask for a speaker to come to campus during finals week. He also mentioned that the iPhone app for Blackboard doesn't do anything, really.

Greg Rickert shared some information from a Blackboard training on how to do Exemplary Course program. He shared the course rubrics, and has 81+ PowerPoint slides if you want more.

The rubric itself is at http://kb.blackboard.com/download/attachments/47153583/2010+Blackboard+Exemplary+Course+Rubric.docx
(downloaded a little funky for me, but I did not have the latest Word to view it)

Some good tools:
Slideshare - PowerPoint on the web (perhaps with audio)
Ispringfree - convert PowerPoint to flash
Jing - online video

(screen capture - with control+PrintScreen is very useful)

The new Blackboard may have a table of contents feature (like SoftChalk does)

Some discussion of Time Zones - one instructor somewhere uses GMT for all deadlines, etc. Hope our Blackboard see the times in EST.

Videos on Wednesdays

I'm going to try to put out a video each Wednesday covering web tools that I use that I think are useful for higher education.

Here's a rough map of what I think I'm going to cover first - suggest what you want more of, or what else I should cover.

What do I think college instructors need to know about?

Social networking: Facebook

Online applications: Google Documents

Online video: YouTube

Social Bookmarking: delicious

Radio (lectures) on demand: Podcasting

Microblogging: Twitter

Community writing: Wikis (Wikipedia)

Picture manipulation: Flickr/Picnik/Animoto


Blogs

RSS readers (read lots of web pages/blogs in one place): Google Reader / Bloglines

Online teleconferencing: Skype

Mapping: Google Earth

Mashups: google maps mashups / machinima

Testing Higher Education Web

I'd love to begin a discussion of how we could use "web 2.0" tools in education, particularly higher education.