Teaching with Technology

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb302/is_2_34/ai_n45100148/?tag=content;col1

While my primary journal to review is the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, I have chosen to go to my secondary source for History which is Teaching History: A Journal of Methods. I read the article in the Fall 2009 issue by Julie Hoffman, entitled “Blackboard or Blog? Some thoughts about creating and assigning on-line components in college history courses.” I chose this article because of its relevance to my goal of using technology in my History classes and because the use of Blackboard and blogs is one of the current hot uses of technology in higher education.

The author is a professor who teaches undergraduate History courses at the university level.  She chose to teach two survey courses in World History and a couple of upper level History courses using the Blackboard discussion tool and blogs using a platform called Live Journal. Her article outlines the specifics of the assignments she used in these courses. While she differentiates between the Blackboard discussion tool and the Live Journal blogs, her observations appear to be relevant to any usage of a online forum available to students. The biggest distinction she points out in her conclusion is: “the greatest strength of the blog environment is that it allows one to write essays that link to online articles, images, and other media.” In other words, the students have more options to express themselves on the assignments which are done on line.”

I was interested in her overall observations on using on-line discussions and posting of assigned essays, question responses, etc,  to supplement her face to face classes.  She noted at the beginning that her experience was that even though college age students are very tech savvy at using social networking sites,  the use of an online site for academic purposes was alien to most of them, who were not interested in sharing thoughts and ideas as contributors to an academic discussion.

She reached a few conclusions, but mostly made observations.  The key conclusion was to tailor the assignment to the technology. She points out that one of her blogging assignments could just has easily been done in a face to face setting with better results. Nevertheless as noted above, she concludes that for upper level courses the greater flexibility of Live Journal type blogging platforms allows students to be creative.

Here are a few of her other observations that I found interesting:

1) She set minimum requirements for participation by requiring a certain number of postings per week and providing a rubric defining what a quality posting was. This rubric was a key point in assessing student performance.

2) The students were willing to make observations about other students comments and postings, but were unwilling to provide critical comments. She notes that even the most opinionated students in class would not take issue with their fellow students online.

3) She had more success in giving the students open ended questions to discuss as opposed to more narrow topics – for example she changed one assignment so that students were to comment on the “muddiest point” and had more responses and interaction than when she posed narrower questions for the assignment.

4) Student evaluation of the assignments varied, but a number of students felt that they were being given “busy work” to do outside of regular class hours and that they were reluctant to spend additional time on online discussion on top of face to face class time.

5) Online discussion and blogs favors the introverted student who feels uncomfortable in entering into a discussion in a face to face setting. Online allows them to refine and consider their comments before making them.

6) She noted that a faculty presence online, in addition to the guidelines for the discussion, was key to keep things on track and act as a reminder to students that online discussion was “still coursework that matters.”

7) There was not a lot of collaborative learning going on. One of the proposed advantages of online blogging is the way that the students and the teacher can learn together by collaborating and interacting. This didn’t occur much. Perhaps at the graduate level, with more motivated students, this could be more successful.

A few thoughts that I had are:

1) Using an online component is going to take a greater time commitment for both the faculty member and the student to implement than a face to face course. Reading all the posts and responding, in addition to regular classroom work, is going to add  to the required work to be done for both.

2) I struggle with grading in this process. There is a base foundation knowledge in History that is essential. It is relatively easy to grade on tests with some objective and some essay questions. Grading, at least for me, on papers and essays (and online posts if I implement online components) would seem to me to be really hard. Even with a rubric that is pretty clearly defined, a lot of reading and assessing would be necessary. Assigning a letter or number grade on discussion points might be hard to do and incredibly subjective.

3) I agree that online usage of discussion and blogs would assist the student who is reluctant to participate in classroom discussion.  However,  I suspect that just like in face to face classes there are people that tend to dominate the discussion, the same would take place in an online format. Also, and maybe this is just my background, students, if they are to be successful in the “real world,” are going to have to be able to participate in face to face discussions and negotiations, and “think on their feet.” Musing about deep thoughts and tapping away on computer keyboard or telephone keys “ain’t gonna cut it” in a meeting where you need to make a point. Face to face class discussion should be a key part of every students performance assessment for introverts, extroverts, and any other classification of students.