internet resources Bryan Alexander Using technology in teaching and learning Resources to help you navigate a digital world umans have been teaching and learn­ Several factors combine to make exploring Hing by technology since Socrates fi rst this technopedagogical record diffi cult. One complained about it in the 4th century BCE is the tradition of classroom privacy, which Phaedrus. Now that we are into the second can cloak projects and discussion. Another decade of the Web and the Internet’s second is the difficulty of sharing information across generation, we have seen a wide range of campus populations. Public anxieties about practices emerge for teaching and learn­ technology, fueled by media stories and, oc­ ing with technology. As technologies have casionally, politicians, play a role in sapping proliferated and developed, teachers have discourse. More recently, the tendency to developed and shared techniques and proj­ publish course content to venues closed to ects through networks and institutions. In the public further clouds the fi eld. Neverthe­ this cyberspatial milieu, students have been less, enough work has surfaced and been guinea pigs and innovators, taking classes, discussed that a set of teaching principles or experiencing projects, helping teachers and themes can be identified, thanks largely to the staff support instructors teach, graduating as collaborative ethos of the educational tech­ alumni, and sometimes returning as staff. nology profession. We can also distinguish Learning and teaching practices have drawn practices, projects, and services by types of on larger cultural transformations and affor­ computer­mediated communication. dances enabled by cyberculture. For example, the enormous explosion in popularly generated Themes Web content from personal home pages to Learning materials published to the Web, or Amazon book reviews has demonstrated the some network, have supplemented other viability of Sir Tim Berners­Lee’s invention for class materials. Lectures in transcription or creative expression, leading to millions of pages sound files, video clips of chemical processes, created by students and instructors. molecular animations, fly­bys through his­ The decades­long successes of discussion torical structures all have in common several groups (Usenet through Google Groups) and features. By being accessible outside of class e­mail have shown the utility of asynchronous time, they can be experienced on a student’s conversation, which was rapidly incorporated schedule. That experience can partake of into class discussions. The ease of creating many digital features that differ from some presentations in PowerPoint, combined with of the analogue world, such as repeatability their vast popularity in the business and (replaying a video), scrubbing (rerunning a governmental worlds, has led to vast num­ bers of multimedia slideshows in the hands of teachers and students. The sheer size and accessibility of cyberculture has transformed Bryan Alexander is research director for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, e-mail: teaching and doing research at every educa­ [email protected] tional level. © 2007 Bryan Alexander C&RL News February 2007 96 difficult passage in a new language), segmen­ both. For example, a discussion thread may tation (focusing on one page from a site), and begin with a reference to an online reading, transferability (a phrase copied from CD­ROM or constitute responses to a Flickr image. The text into e­mail to instructor). Instructors can continuum may map onto nondigital materials partake of the digital medium’s fl uidity, reiter­ and venues, as when a digital object sparks a ating and tweaking objects over time. classroom face­to­face discussion, or watching The social nature of this media experience a play provokes blog posts followed by com­ has been underappreciated until recently. We ments. Moreover, projects may scale up from inherit many assumptions that individuals individual cases along this continuum, into experience items in isolation, derived from hybrid learning classes, virtual departments other media (film, TV, games), linguistic (NITLE’s Sunoikisis, for example), and discus­ habits (“You are talking on the phone!” rather sion between classes in time and space. than “You are talking with your friend”), and schools of technological criticism arguing Discussion boards that machines separate, rather than connect, Discussion fora date back to the 1970s. In people. Networked computing has proven, current teaching practice, they appear either in fact, to be quite the opposite—a social within enterprise­level systems or indepen­ enabler. The Internet has linked people from dently. the beginning, to the extent that the relatively • Blackboard. A course management recent term “social software” purports to re­ system, Blackboard includes several forms store some of the Internet’s original intention. of discussion boards. Other CMSes include Even more recently, the rise of massively WebCT, Moodle, and Sakai. Access: http:// multiplayer online gaming has returned the blackboard.com/products/Academic_Suite/. social nature of networked computing to • John Suler, “Extending the Class- popular discussion. room into Cyberspace: The Discussion In education, this social nature has been Board.” A psychologist’s view on how to one of the major virtues of digital technolo­ maximize use of discussion boards; ap­ gies. Discussion boards (Usenet, PHPBB) peared in CyberPsychology and Behavior, 7, and fora (WebBoard, Caucus), e­mail, instant 397­403. Access: http://www.rider.edu/~suler messenger, groupware, and course manage­ /psycyber/extendclass.html. ment systems (CMSes, Blackboard, WebCT, • PHPBB. A widely used open source Moodle, Sakai) have supported threaded and discussion forum—easy to install, support, unthreaded conversations among students and use. Access: http://www.phpbb.com/ both geographically copresent and dispersed. • Worcester Polytech, “Improving Web 2.0 technologies have enabled different the Use of Discussion Boards.” This set of discussion forms, such as distributed con­ practical guidelines is informed by scholar­ versations (blogs), conversations embedded ship and applies to a variety of platforms. within documents (wikis), and threads at­ Access: http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC tached to “social objects” (Flickr). /Collaboratory/Idea/boards.html. These conversations have sometimes been distinguished by their temporal nature, asyn­ Web publishing chronous (discussion boards, blogs) versus • Dreamweaver. Few teachers and synchronous (chat, Second Life, IM). Discus­ students produce Web content by hand­cod­ sions in both forms have connected members ing HTML. Instead they use Web editors, of of a class to each other, students to instructors, which Macromedia’s Dreamweaver remains and students with learners elsewhere. the most popular. Access: http://www.adobe. Both of these themes constitute a continu­ com/products/dreamweaver/. um of sociability and objects, with most digital • Euclid’s Elements, Interactive Pre- learning occurring with some combination of sentation. A Furman University project, February 2007 97 C&RL News this series of pages constitutes a tutorial tak­ of pedagogy. Access: http://www.rc.umd. ing students through a classical math text. edu/pedagogies/commons/innovations/rap Access: http://math.furman.edu/~jpoole /toc.htm. /euclidselements/euclid.htm. • Wiki evaluation tools. This article • Salem Witch Trials Documentary from Dossiers technopedagogiques links as­ Archive. A very rich set of documents sessment to wiki capabilities. Access: http:// for study. Access: http://etext.virginia.edu www.profetic.org:16080/dossiers/article. /salem/witchcraft/home.html. php3?id_article=973. • Virtual Seminars for Teaching Lit- • Wikipedia. The most widely recog­ erature. Oxford made a vast WWI archive nized wiki project is the Wikipedia, a pub­ available for teaching by publishing it to the licly editable encyclopedia. Access: http:// Web through a user­generated hypertext en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). engine. Access: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk /ltg/projects/jtap/. Blogging • Visual Elements Periodic Table. A Blog platforms and projects have proliferated fine visualization from the Royal Society of enormously in the past half­decade, due, in Chemistry. Access: http://www.chemsoc.org/ part, to ease of use. viselements/pages/pertable_fl a.htm. • Barbara Ganley at Middlebury Col- lege. This faculty member blogs about her Wikis work, reflects on blogging, and teaches • Google Docs. Google purchased a wiki with blogs in a variety of innovative ways. hosting project, then integrated it within their Her blog contains links to all of these. Ac­ suite of linked services. Access: http://docs. cess: http://mt.middlebury.edu/middblogs google.com/. /ganley/bgblogging/. • Jim Giles, “Internet encyclopaedias • Blogger. A very popular and basic blog­ go head to head.” A controversial and in­ ging tool, hosted by a company owned by fluential study finding Wikipedia and Brit­ Google, Blogger is a fine starting point. Basic tanica entries to have comparable error rates. accounts are free. Access: http://blogger. Nature December 2005­March 2006. Access: com. http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212 • LiveJournal. This service adds more func­ /full/438900a.html. tionality to blogging, including fl agging content • Pmwiki. Many wiki packages are avail­ for emotional state, and aggregating friends able for users to download and host. Pmwiki through links. It is