iterativelearning

When Web 2.0 first started to catch fire among faculty teaching online, the widespread assumption was that the NetGen students would be extremely adept at using the tools because they used them all the time to connect with their friends, check out new music and videos, and so on. But some recent research has been chipping away at this assumption (e.g., Digital Learners not Digital Natives and Not so techno-savvy).

Continuing this trend is a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. on researchers from the Community College Research Center at Columbia’s Teacher College who looked at students taking online classes from various community colleges in Washington state. One of the key take-aways was how this assumption overlooks the factor of socio-economics:

People assume this generation is super-technologically sophisticated, but that’s not necessarily true, especially in the community-college population, which tends to be low income, disadvantaged …

I’m using VoiceThread in the EdTec class I’m teaching this summer and was curious about students’ perceptions of this tool versus the more text-oriented medium of the blog. I wasn’t looking for anything scientific, just some informal, preliminary feedback, but one of the more interesting comments had to do with how our blog was organized. For this student, she found the standard chronological sequence problematic because it didn’t allow her to follow a thread by topic, which made reviewing the conversation that took place there a more disjointed experience.

As anyone who has taught online already knows, blogs certainly have solid potential as a platform for facilitating discussions, but as blogs mature, students can perceive them as just another assignment-box to check. Aware of this reality, teachers then don their creativity caps with the hope of designing blog assignments that encourage discussions to flow more organically, where students are participating in more self-directed styles. Who knows, maybe a more topically organized interface would allow for better usability, and therefore help faculty with meeting this goal? Perhaps the topics could be arranged in one or more circles with each topic being click-able. And to add a little more usability sugar to the mix, maybe topics could be named (e.g., folksonomy) and managed by assigned student-facilitators. Perhaps it’s time to think about alternative designs for the education blog.

Flickr image credit: cogdogblog