Online Tools for Teaching: Student Contributions
January 6 - January 10, 1997
Philosophy
Derek Bok once observed that one of the reasons Harvard kept getting
better and better was that each of its students left a piece of knowledge
behind.
In those days, the knowledge left behind was bound up as a thesis and
stored on the shelves of Weinder Library. Today, with the world wide web,
every student in every course has an opportunity to make a contribution to
the course today and in the future, to the department, the university,
and, in fact, the whole global university.
Professors can tab this potential by devising mechanisms for students
to write for their classmates rather than "for her eyes only." Courses can
turn news groups and mailing lists into articles, literature reviews,
journals, databases, and libraries. Professors with extensive slide SETS
can have these collections digitized (perhaps most easliy through the
Photo-CD process), and guide students as they index, annotate, and
structure the slide collection; it's even possible that small audio and
video clips can be produced - and digitized.
In a few years, every department can have a highly visible yet
uniquely individual library of resources available to the world community
of scholars. All it takes is learning how to give students credit
for work well done.
Specific Projects Contributing to a Web of Knowledge
Here's a collection of projects - some that would work in large
introductory lecture courses, others suitable for honors seminars.
(Hmm. Maybe the honors seminar could become an editorial board
for the introductory lecture series!)
- Adopt an X - where X is a person, place or thing being studied in
the course. It could be an atom, an animal, an important researchers
in the field, a planet, or a pathogen. These adoptions result in
"encyclopedia" like articles that eventually build a knowledge base
for the course.
- Book Review - collateral reading is always a good source;
everyone needs an annotated bibliography and a literature review.
- Current Contents - Teams of students could "adopt a journal"
and publish summary / review articles.
- Expert Systems - The art of collecting materials for a library
borders on a scientific one. The field of "expert systems" provides
a particular model of how to go about doing this.
- Law Review - Just to remind us that this is not a unique idea;
even graduate and professional students can benefit from the ability
to publish on the web.
- Portfolio projects - Many schools are learning to assess
student work using "portfolios" of work. Collecting these portfolios
is a useful way to build a course gallery, library, or museum.
- Project presentations - In many courses, students already prepare
term projects, often case studies, and present them orally. Using the
web as a publishing medium is an easy step; digitizing audio and video
clips is a bonus.
- Text book - By making the course "textbook" an object of writing
as well as reading, the students this semester can prepare the text
book that will be used by the students next semester.
Resources
Steve.Cavrak@Uvm.Edu