Teaching with Technology

John P. Workman, Jr.

Marketing Education Review, Volume 18 Number 1 (Spring 2008)

“When teaching a core curriculum class it is often a challenge to over come apathy & disconnect” (Shanahan, Hermans & Haytko 2006).  In response to this situation the author introduced a Wiki project into a Principals of Marketing.  The user generated content, developed over the course of the semester, was available online as marketing tool for the City of Omaha.

This idea came about to increase the student engagement.  Since the majority of his students were non-marketing majors he felt this project he felt would appeal to them as well as help the marketing majors. It also met other goals; helping students communicate effectively, bring greater alignment across the instructors teaching research and service activities; helping student understand intellectual property & copyright laws.

The Project appears to be extremely well laid out and the author’s enthusiasm for the project is apparent. Students started off with a hand out summarizing editing commands. The wiki was set up so to the public could view it but only students could edit. They devoted 15 minutes per class to discussing the contributions. Each Class discussion about the wiki related to the chapter they were covering. For Example, the chapter on promotion created a discussion of user generated ads (Three 2007 Super Bowl ads had been done that way) and a logo design competition.  It counted for 30% of their grades and the instructor tracked student edits. Individual students also provided lists of articles created, edits and uploaded photos, with narrative for the logic. This was used to establish whom to credit.  The professor kept the momentum going by celebrating milestones (500^th article) and reporting site traffic. He also arranged for the final presentation to be attended by various VP’s including the Omaha Convention and Visitors Bureau thus lending credence to the project.

He judged the success of the project based on the student questionnaire at courses end.  He felt it was positively received, 70% said it was valuable, 81% had talked about it outside the classroom 97% wanted to see the site continue operation. The questionnaire also helped to understand how the students worked on the project with most of it occurring off campus indicating that the site access needed to remain open (IT had wanted to restrict it).

There were some comments by students who flet they missed out by not participating in a traditional Marketing Plan Project, something the author excused as an indication of problems with teaching innovations. Not enough information was provided to see if he is correct in this assumption, however, the point of a Marketing Plan is to learn the subject and it appears with the connections to each chapter that this goal was probably reached.

According to the instructor “The project does not seem beyond the technical abilities of most students.”  He therefore felt that wikis could be used in different classes, and “provides a good basis for class discussion around content”.  He also brings up the point of cumulative knowledge, expressing opinions and giving examples of wikis being used semester after semester to grow or being used across university boundaries to create true collaborative learning.  He cites some challenges as well, the greatest of which is the time and technical expertise needed to manage the site. The author was pretty much on his own with little help from the university IT department. It seems that this would be a steep learning curve for the first time use that would improve after additional semester were completed. The second challenge is the time it took him to monitor the contributions and organize the content. The vandalism and verbal attacks that can occur with wikis were not a problem because of the restricted access.

The wikis do appear to “provide a unique opportunity for collaborative learning”. An instructor must be prepared to spend a substantial amount of extra time to develop, monitor, implement into curriculum, and cheerlead if necessary. I think making it an actual site recognized by the city lead to the success of the project, providing validation to the students. I am not sure if it is a good replacement for a Marketing Plan, and if it is worth the effort involved. It is however always a good idea to attempt to integrate new technology into the classroom if only to keep things fresh & relevant to the student body.

Although various resources for learning L2 vocabulary have become available on the Internet, we know very little about the effectiveness of these resources.  How helpful are these resources for L2 vocabulary learners?  Are these resources are being used in L2 classrooms?  “Expanding Academic Vocabulary with Interactive On-line Database” is one of the few studies of the effectiveness of on-line tools for vocabulary learning.

The authors of this study highlight a quote from an article by Anita J. Sokmen on the desirable features of computerized vocabulary activities: “At present, a good deal of vocabulary software is decidedly lacking in variety of exercise and depth of processing.  There is a need for programs which specialize on a useful corpus, provide the expanded rehearsal, and engage the learner on deeper levels and in a variety of ways as they practice vocabulary.”  These standards mentioned by Sokmen are used by the authors in their evaluations of 50 on-line vocabulary sites.  They found that only a few vocabulary learning sites meet the standards outlined by Sokmen.   Only a few of the sites offered  “activities for learning vocabulary that occurs frequently in a specified corpus” and multiple contextualized examples of target words in use.  The four sites that satisfied the standards were (1) the Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb. 2000), (2) The Virtual Language Centre (Greaves), (3) Haywoods’ Academic Vocabulary site, (4) Mason’s Culture Shock page, and (5) Gerry’s Vocabulary Database (Luton, 2000).  Some of the beneficial features found in these on-line vocabulary learning sites include concordance, dictionary, cloze-builder, hyper text, and a database with an interactive self-quizzing features.

The context of the study was a vocabulary course designed for ESL students at intermediate levels.  The participants were ESL students enrolled at two Canadian universities.  They had a variety of L1 backgrounds but were all viewed as intermediate-level learners. In this experimental course, the researches examined a number of on-line computer resources that had adopted the corpus-based approach, provided a collaborative on-line word bank activity, allowed students to hear the entered words and collocations, and offered a concordancing feature with rich linguistic information about new words in multiple sentence contexts.  The targeted vocabulary to be learned consisted of  high-frequency words in university textbooks (from Coxhead’s Adacemic World List), and low-frequency words in academic texts.  Analyzing the data from the pilot course that was taken for four sessions (fall 2000, fall 2001, summer 2002, and fall 2002), the researchers concluded that the results of their “experimentation are positive and  augur well for the further development of interactive on-line activities that offer rich input and encourage deeper processing.”