EDUCAUSE Day Two

Today was the first full day of the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference here in Orlando.  I caught several great sessions, and I thought I might share a few clickers-related highlights here on the blog.

First, I’ll follow up on yesterday’s thought about the ways in which Web 2.0 tools such as blogs and wikis can raise the bar for student participation by making students more publicly accountable for their work.  I attended a session presented by Gardner Campbell and Jim Groom in which they described UMW (University of Mary Washington) Blogs, a multi-user blogging platform available to all faculty, staff, and students at UMW.

Gardner noted that most of the scholarly work done by college students is neither public nor permanent.  Students turn in term papers, those papers are graded and returned to students, and that’s the end of them in most cases.  Having students post their work to blogs means the work is more public and more permanent.  Their work is seen not only by their instructors but by other students in the course and, as Gardner conveyed in a couple of anecdotes, students who took the course in previous semesters and sometimes the authors and artists about which students write in their blog posts.

The public nature of the blogging platform increases accountability for students and, at least at UMW, seems to help students engage more deeply in the learning process.  This talk helped reinforce for me the important role accountability plays in teaching and learning, whether that accountability is provided by blogs, wikis, or classroom response systems.  (For more on the UMW Blogs initiative, check out one of Gardner’s recent blog posts.)

In the interest of keeping my blog posts concise, I’ll stop here for this post and share further thoughts on the conference in my next post.