Wired Pursuits

As an educator, I’ve always looked for new and interesting ways to engage my students (that desire also followed me into the corporate world when I started speaking and presenting to clients).

As a future college professor, and hopefully a soon to be teaching assistant, I’m collecting examples of how professors are using technology to connect with students where they live (i.e., online) and to create more dynamic learning environments.

Here are some resources I’ve come across related to using technology in the classroom.

• Academic Commons attempted to “understand better the changing nature of learning in new media environments and the potential of new media environments to make learning–and faculty insights into teaching–visible and usable.”
• Visible Knowledge Project, “a five-year project looking at the impact of technology on learning, primarily in the humanities, through the lens of the scholarship of teaching and learning.”  The studies were conducted from 2000 to 2005, and a lot has changed since then, so it will be interesting to see if findings still ring true.
• Classroom experiment conducted by Dr. Wesch at Kansas State University. “Instead of the standard syllabus that requires everybody to read a few articles to discuss, we decided instead to organize ourselves into a Smart Mob that would try to read a good hunk of the literature on a single topic in one go.”

I hope that all educators continually mix up what they do in the classroom, looking to find the right mix of technology and face-to-face with the hopes of creating a more dynamic, and yes, fun, way to learn.

If you know of others experimenting with technology in the classroom, let me know.