Faculty Focus

HIGHER ED TEACHING STRATEGIES FROM MAGNA PUBLICATIONS

web 2.0 tools

Getting Started with Student Blogs: Tips for the Digital Immigrant

Digital Natives are all around us. They populate our college courses and use the newest mobile technologies to communicate, collaborate, create and share information on social media sites. There is, however, often a disconnection on their path to learning. Quite often we find Digital Native students taught by Digital Immigrant professors (Prensky, 2001) who fear, dismiss or are unaware of the potential learning power of Web 2.0 technologies.

Read More »

Head in the Clouds? Ten Free Web 2.0 Tools to Support Faculty Research

Twenty-first Century research is increasingly becoming reliant on information and communication technologies to address systemic and distinct educational problems through greater communication, interaction, and inquiry. Research is an interactive inquiry process. In many instances this involves interaction with people. We also interact with technology and through technology to improve our educational practice. Practitioner research seeks to understand the underlying causes enabling personal and organizational change (Reason & Bradbury, 2001).

Read More »

Help Students Develop Lifelong Learning Skills with Web 2.0 Tools

A University of Colorado at Denver student in Joni Dunlap’s learning design course has a question about embedding music into a slideshow presentation for an assignment he was working on. He tweets about it and immediately hears back from people in the community of practice who offer resources that help him quickly complete the task.

Read More »

Web 2.0 Tools in the Classroom: Embracing the Benefits While Understanding the Risks

Earlier this year a UCLA student made a video tirade against Asian students and posted it to YouTube. She quickly removed the hateful clip, but it was too late. The damage was done.

Although an extreme case, it’s a good example of how inappropriate behavior can not only spread rapidly far beyond one’s circle of friends, but can damage a reputation for years to come. Students don’t always thinking about this, nor are they aware that employers now regularly use Google and social networks to check out prospective employees.

Read More »

Web 2.0 Grows Up, Goes to College

It’s not easy to get unanimous agreement on anything these days, but on this most educators can agree:

  1. An instructor’s personality impacts student learning;
  2. More is learned in a class than just course content; and
  3. It can be difficult to show your personality in an online course.
Read More »