Travel Diaries of a Web 2.0 Newbie

Using these types of methods would certainly be a departure from the norm for most of the students. I imagine the novelty value would be a big attraction, at the beginning. If well planned, it could really take hold and grab the attention and energy of the students.

I love the ideas of the class wikis – we already have keen, intelligent and self-motivated students who put energy and effort into painstakingly constructing their own sets of revision notes and guides. Now this could become a collaborative effort and hopefully with a consequent increase in the quality of the material included. It would also give these students a peer group that would further motivate and encourage them. Doing the wiki online would give the students a broader range of resources for compiling the information and more flexibility in the method they choose to display the content. For some of them this may be a constructive way to put to use other skills they have but may not necessarily find an outlet for during ”normal” school lessons.It also gives them a defined project on which to put them to use, if they have been finding lack of direction a problem.

The idea of writing blog entries for homework assignments is interesting. I’m afraid I am a little sceptical about what is termed, in the article, “their conversational nature”. In my subject, Biology, answers do have to contain some well thought-out and detailed information and the wording and vocabulary used, in many cases, has to be precise – would this work with a blog-style entry?

However, having students read and mark or criticise others’ entries would certainly add an extra dimension to my students’ learning experience, and is an analytical skill that would benefit them in a number of other subjects, where criticism of any sort of text is required. It would also help us get away from the students’ fixation on marks/grades for their work and hopefully make them more analytical of the content and improvements they could make.

If I’m being at all negative about any of the Web 2.0 methods, it would be a worry about the amount of time it would take to implement and run them – the thought of having to listen to numerous podcasts for suitable content, or sorting through and tagging webpages is a little daunting. But if I was convinced about the benefits to my students, I would just have to get organised and get on with it.

Science 2.0?

I was surprised to see that Web 2.0 is also becoming a useful tool in my former field of biological research. Called Science 2.0, an article in a recent podcast from the scientific journal Nature, describes how authors writing a review article about their research field for the magazine Scientific American, decided to post a draft of the article on the web as a blog and then invited other researchers to comment on the article and its contents. The combined input was then collated and the review published in the magazine. The podcast also talked about how some research labs are now using blogs to record their results and lab books in an effort to hopefully bring about more dynamic collaborations between different research groups working in the same field. As many undergraduates who study biological sciences at university or college go on to do research, and if using Science 2.0 is going to be a skill that is useful in research positions, won’t our students be better equipped if they are familiar with and can use these techniques effectively now?

The Nature podcast edition I was talking about can be found (by clicking the hyperlink or the icon to the left of it) here:

Nature Podcast 17/4/2008

or here:

http://media.nature.com/download/nature/nature/podcast/v452/n7189/nature-2008-04-17.mp3

(Gosh! Aren’t I clever, getting all these hyperlinks sorted out!)