Emerging Technologies at Washington University

The Undergraduate Council has appointed a group to study emerging technologies and assess the extent to which these technologies can improve teaching and learning at Washington University. The Undergraduate Council is chaired by Edward S. Macias (Executive Vice Chancellor, Dean of Arts & Sciences, and the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences) and Gerhild Williams (the Barbara Schaps Thomas and David M. Thomas Professor in the Humanities). The Emerging Technologies Group, chaired by Associate Vice Chancellor Dennis Martin, includes faculty, administrators, staff, and two undergraduate students.¹

The group recently examined a wide range of emerging technologies that students currently use, often for recreational and social purposes. Several of these are applications or formats that are helping to transform the Internet from a medium for disseminating and gathering information to a medium for collaboration.² The following discussion highlights three examples of Internet collaboration with implications for teaching and learning.

Collaboration: Google Docs and Spreadsheets, Wikis, and Blogs

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

Google offers a free service that allows one to create documents and spreadsheets that can then be viewed and edited on any computer with a Web browser. This service allows you to begin writing a paper on your office computer, upload it to your account on Google Docs and Spreadsheets, then access and edit it from a different computer in another location (without carrying along a CD or jump drive). The documents are stored online by Google.

The potential for collaboration comes with the service's capacity to be used for group projects: it allows you to create and upload documents that can be viewed and edited collectively, by each member of a group. Editing by multiple group members can then occur simultaneously, from computers at different locations. You can set up this feature to give each group member either "read-only" or editing privileges. Completed documents or spreadsheets can be either downloaded or published to the Web. To access Google Documents and Spreadsheets, it is necessary to set up an account. For more information, go to http://docs.google.com.

For assistance with setting up Google Docs and Spreadsheets, contact Melissa Vetter, Reference/Subject Librarian for Psychology, PNP, and Linguistics, University Libraries, at mvetter@wustl.edu.

Wikis

Wikis are Web sites written by multiple authors who not only contribute text, images, references, and links, but also serve as one another's editors. The wikis that are most often read and utilized by students are drawn from Wikipedia.org , an online alternative to printed encyclopedias. Students often use Wikipedia as a source in research projects and papers.

Faculty should familiarize themselves with Wikipedia so that they can provide students guidance on its advantages and disadvantages as a reference tool. For example, Wikipedia entries are certainly likely to be more current than entries in a printed encyclopedia. However, the newer the information is, the less reliable it is apt to be, because it has not yet been subject to substantial editing to correct misinformation, bias, or other problems. The ideal scenario, as explained on Wikipedia.org, is that such problems will indeed be found and corrected through the collective writing and editing process. Readers of Wikipedia cannot assume that this ideal has been met, given the fluid nature of the information in each entry.

The widespread use of Wikipedia by college students, despite its drawbacks, should prompt faculty who require research projects to teach their students sound research practices, including not assuming that any source is unbiased or error-free. You might, for example, display in class a Wikipedia entry on a topic in which you have expertise and point out any mistakes, biases, or missing information that suggests the importance of finding additional, printed sources. For an article describing how one professor responded to these issues by developing an assignment asking students to edit and write Wikipedia entries, click here.

Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia, has recently launched a new online, collaborative encyclopedia at Citizendium.org . Anyone can contribute to this encyclopedia, as is true of Wikipedia, but all contributions to Citizendium must be approved by a panel of scholar-editors. Unlike on Wikipedia.org, moreover, contributors must identify themselves by name.

For assistance with wikis, contact Joy Weese Moll, Reference/Web Services Librarian, University Libraries, at jmoll@wustl.edu or 935-7466.

Blogs

A blog, short for "Weblog," is a chronologically-reversed log of entries about a particular topic that is hosted on a Web site. The entries may be made by the site's host or by its readers. The format allows for frequent updates and for the participants to refer to one another's ideas and arguments; often, participants also include links to other material published on the Web and elsewhere. You can set up a blog on an existing Web site using, for example, HTML or Dreamweaver. If you do not have experience constructing Web sites, you can use software, such as WordPress, that is specifically designed for creating blogs. You also have the option of having your blog hosted on a remote site that provides a Web interface for blog-updating; two of the most popular sites are Blogger.com and WordPress.com. For assistance with using blogs in teaching, contact Joy Weese Moll at jmoll@wustl.edu or 935-7466.

Blogs may be utilized for online discussions of course topics. Faculty can set up a blog, then require every student to contribute several entries, or responses to other entries, each week. Successful course blogs, like other online discussions, do not just "happen," however. You must give students clear guidelines on how and when they should post as well as how their posts will be evaluated and graded.

Grading Collaborative Work

While requiring collaborative work can be an effective means of facilitating opportunities for students to learn from one another, it poses challenges when it comes to grading, a process that faculty and students more often see in terms of individual achievement. Give careful thought to the criteria you will use to evaluate student work, including whether there is a collaborative component for which students earn a "collective" grade. Sharing these criteria with students will help them adapt to a collaborative assignment. Students who have a strong work ethic and who are accustomed to excelling as individuals often have the hardest time adjusting. For assistance with establishing grading criteria for collaborative work, contact The Teaching Center at 935-6810.

The “Cool” Factor: Use It and Lose It?

As shown by the ECAR study reviewed in this newsletter, today’s students come to college with what they report to be strong IT skills, but the skills they have acquired are often primarily applicable for social and recreational purposes. Thus, your students may well be familiar with blogs, wikis, and other forms of collaboration via the Internet. However, they may not be excited about using these applications and formats for academic purposes. In other words, once they confront all the necessary requirements and guidelines that come with using technology to complete course work, and once they experience being graded on this work, many students will inevitably see this use of technology as just another assignment.

The challenge is to keep students engaged, even when the “cool” factor has faded. Take the time to tell your students what you think technology adds to learning and teaching. Explain the value of learning to use technology effectively for academic and professional reasons—in addition to following their favorite sports teams, downloading music, and communicating with their friends. Finally, keep in mind that not all students are as “wired” as you might assume they are; many need guidance on how to use technology. For further discussion of these issues, see the highlights of the ECAR study in “New Study of Undergraduates and Information Technology.”