EDUCAUSE Day One

After my first day at my first EDUCAUSE Conference, I’ve learned a few things…

• The Orange County Convention Center is gigantic.  This may be the largest building I’ve ever been in.  It’s so large the conference staff ride around on Segues.
• Every other vendor exhibition at every other conference I’ve attended is small potatoes compared to the vendor exhibition here.  See some pictures at Christine Sexton’s blog.
• The free soft drinks provided by the conference on breaks are great, in part because the soda machines at the OCCC charge three dollars for a 20 ounce Pepsi.  That’s pricier than Disney World!

I went to one of the pre-conference seminars today and had a bit of a clickers-related brainstorm during a presentation on Web 2.0 tools in college and university teaching…

Let’s say you’re using a wiki with your course.  I’ve known for a while now that most wikis will allow you to see exactly how your students contribute to the wiki–how often they edit pages, what kinds of edits they make, etc.  I’ve been thinking of this kind of data in terms of what’s often called the scholarship of teaching and learning–asking questions about student learning and answering those questions by systematically collecting and analyzing evident of student learning.  The contribution data that wikis automatically generate seems to me to be a goldmine for understanding how students interact with course content.

I’ve also heard from many faculty members who use classroom response systems that the fact that students can be held accountable for their participation by such systems helps motivate students to participate during class.  They can no longer hide in the back of the class and let other students answer the instructor’s questions.  Not only that, but the use of clickers can communicate to students that their instructors are interested in hearing what they have to say.  Since all students are given a voice of sorts by the clickers, all students are given a chance to contribute to the class dialog.  As a result, the use of clickers raises the bar for class participation and many students respond very positively to this.

During the seminar today, I connected these two ideas.  Doing so helped clarify for me the value in Web 2.0 tools like wikis.  The tools that wikis provide for tracking contributions by students help to make public (to their instructors, to their peers, perhaps to the whole world) the work that the students do.  This helps hold the students accountable for their work, which can increase their participation levels.  Likewise, the invitation to contribute to a class wiki helps give more students a voice in the class, which can also enhance participation.

I’ve heard several instructors say that the accountability factor is a key ingredient to the success of clickers in promoting student engagement.  It seems to me that leverage that aspect of Web 2.0 tools like wikis will help those tools generate student engagement as well.

More tomorrow!