Web 2.0 and Comp I: do they fit? Teaching the argumentative essay: will a wiki help?

The eLearning Guild’s (http://elearningguild.com/) great newsletter, Learning Solutions: Practical Applications of Technology for Learning, has offered me some rich ideas to ponder in advance of teaching The Argumentative Essay this fall for a local community college. I was also fortunate enough to participate in their Online Forum “Designing and Developing E-learning Interactions.”

So let me do some thinking out loud about how blogs or wikis or podcasts might fit into my teaching, always keeping a careful eye on my students and what will work for them, what will engage them.

Blogs
I love the idea of introducing writing students to blogging. However, I very much need the most transparent tool I can find. When I compose a blog entry for my own blog, I am always annoyed at how much mini-coding I have to do in order to make it appear professional on the web. And I insist that it look professional and read well. All the links must work.

So, to explore that a bit more, I have downloaded the Blogger for Word plug-in and am giving that a spin today while I think out loud. I already have one link that will need to be coded. Hmmm.

Assuming the technical expertise of my students is sufficient for this to be possible, here’s what I can do: I will create a group blog, invite each student to participate, so it’s a group blog, very like the one I created for my NLII experiment. How might that assist my students? It needs to be directly relevant to their writing assignments. Maybe a one-week trial – use the space for brainstorming for one of the coming essays.

Podcasting
The only way I could insert this technology into my teaching would be to read a few opening paragraphs into my iPod (or directly into Audacity on the PC or Garage Band on the Mac) and post that blog on the course website for them to listen to their own words. Extra work on my part but it emphasizes a point about writing: read it aloud – how does it sound? How does it read? Does it flow? What about sentence length and pace?

Wikis
These intrigue me. Because there is no technical barrier, everyone just goes to one page and does what: posts what and why and can it be used as a group editing tool? With community college undergrads, I don’t want to be doing technical experiments that might turn some of them off. Not everyone likes to play as much as I do.

I explored setting up a free wiki yesterday but it would need to offer, like Blogger, free hosting since I have no intention of installing wiki software on my own website.

Constructivist Learning

• Active and manipulative


• Constructive and reflective


• Instention – geared to self-reflection


• Authentic, challenging, and real world


• Cooperative, collaborative and conversational

My next post will explore each of these five characteristics and see how I can infuse English Comp I with these constructivist principles.  ¶ 11:49 AM