Hodge Podge

This weeks post is going to be a variety of things from class:

On Teaching Online

This is my first semester of teaching online and I must say I am enjoying it tremendously. Of course it helps to have a good group of students who are working hard. There are some things that have surprised me about teaching online and one in particular that related to the discussion on distributed learning. Part of being an effective teacher is to look at feedback from students and adjusting teaching methods and presentation to help engage and accommodate student understanding of material. Online this feedback is by far more difficult to ascertain. The more students email, post to blogs and converse with each other have now become my clues to the progress of the material. And now, instead of seeing faces, body stance, the questions in class, I am relearning these small nuances in terms of the posts and other types of interactions. I am glad that I have a great group for this for they do provide the feedback needed!

On Learning the Basics

Along with the discussion of distributed learning we talked about the need for prior knowledge to be able to build and grow further. When student enter the IT concentration there are certain classes that students are scheduled to take to provide the basics for further technology classes. These were well for those students coming into the program with little technology background. On the other hand, for those coming in with a more technical background but little education background, they are on their own to figure out what background is needed. While with the help of good friends who pointed me to the a couple of great resources I made it through that rough transition and I don't see the need for students to be tested on the basics of education terminology, there could be a happy medium where either the basic foundation class is recommended first. Or, there could be a recommended couple of articles that explains the basic concepts.

On the project

This has been a difficult choice for me this semester. I usually have ideas of what area I want to research on but this semester has been a tough one. The project at the top of the list right now appears to be doing research about what factors correlate with successful use of the web 2.0 wiki technology. Do wiki users need to understand web design? what about word processing? or even simple email? In the next couple of days I have to get my head around this project.