Liz Lane Lawley is teaching a graduate course entitled Current Themes in Information Technology. It’s a distance learning course and she is using a course weblog to organize and present content and is having her students create weblogs where they post their assignments. She has subscribed to their RSS feeds so can easily see when students “turn in” assignments. Office hours are via instant messenger and class discussions take place on IRC. By using “off the shelf” tools such as weblogs, IM and IRC, she has constructed a course space at a fraction of what it would cost to use such tools as WebCT or Blackboard.
Tim Lauer
Actually, we do have an expensive courseware system here (Prometheus right now, which we’re about to replace with Desire2Learn).
I choose not to use it because it’s a closed system. With weblogs and IRC, I can invite guest speakers in, share my course materials with interested colleagues elsewhere, and make RIT more attractive to prospective students.
Posted on March 20, 2005 at 1:54 pm.
I’m interested to look more into how Liz’s students (and her) are using IRC. Not so much because it is novel, but I’m curious about how it works as a learning/discussion space.
Posted on March 20, 2005 at 10:29 pm.
At first, it was a bit of a hardship to change from a format I knew (using First Class) as online courseware, but with a little persistence and playing around, I’ve quickly learned to use Moveable Type to communicate in class and respond to posted class questions and others.
As for IRC, the chat discussions are pretty good even for 9:00am on a Monday morning. IRC of course allows everyone to communicate in real time, so it’s not too difficult for a bunch of ideas to be brought up (though staying on topic can be hard some times). IRC’s also a good tool because you can /msg another classmate or your professor to ask them a question or for more information even if you don’t think it is appropriate for the general class.
Feel free to visit our sites and learn more about how the project is going; I’m sure Liz would be more then happy to lend her insight.
Posted on March 28, 2005 at 10:37 pm.