New media in the classroom – conference session report

Recently, I attended a discussion on “Using New Media Effectively in the Classroom”  by Miles Travis at ConvergeSouth, an inspiring conference themed “Creativity online for everyone”.

Miles is a grad student at George Mason in the history department; his department explores the relationship between history and new media.  Miles defined new media as digital media in a variety of forms, whether on a disk or online, and the different ways of sharing that media.

To introduce students to information, there are a variety of resources. One example is a digital form of a print textbook, for example, the online North Carolina History book for 8th graders.  A different type of resource, History Matters, is more of a gateway to a variety of resources.  Then, there are online resources like American Memory from the Library of Congress, which make available historical materials from a variety of institutions.  However, some surveys show that students still prefer printed text for studying Miles also mentioned tools like Zotero which allow people to share online resources.  (CIT has used Connotea and delicious, which are somewhat similar.)

Some digital resources can be used to help students reconstruct history, so they can learn to evaluate and synthesize information. One example is Martha Ballard’s diary. In this example, students translate text written in an old style, and piece together events from several of sources.

A third type of new media can empower students to produce and exchange original arguments and information.  This is where blogs come in.  Miles showed two diagrams for how blogs could be used, which I’ve tried to reproduce, below.  The diagram on the left shows a model where the students each create a separate blog post to respond to an instructor’s question. There is no interaction, and no building on ideas, it’s more of a traditional essay assignment.  In the diagram on the right, one student is assigned to respond to a prompt and creates a blog entry.  Three students commented on the original entry, and then other students comment on the comments.  This method facilitates the production of new ideas.  In Miles’ experience, to keep the discussion respectful, the comments should be moderated; he also mentioned that if each student has an individual blog, the students do not visit each other’s blogs unless required.

A participant described an assignment to a group, which used a wiki to develop a two page paper.  The students communicated over 300 times in developing the paper; the instructor felt that it was successful, and the discussion was deeper than online discussion boards.

Another participant experimented with using microblogging (like Twitter) in online course; he felt that it was successful and community was formed that still communicates even though the course is over.   Some of us at CIT use Twitter to communicate; in fact, I twittered about this session while it was going on, to share links with colleagues not at the conference.