This is a great example of authentic, complex learning environments. In an advanced computing course at Northern Illinois University, mechanical engineering students work in teams to program and create video games. After creating their virtual models, students can enrol in another course and take their designs to the next level, and turn them into real products, real racing cars.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Monday, February 4, 2008
Group blogging
My colleague Jenny and I have been playing around some more with the group blog idea - testing things out so we can predict issues students might come up against this semester in their drama course, when they use blogs to help with the play building process.
You can see what we been up to here on the Timetoplay blog.
It’s interesting using a blog which is really a tool designed in the first instance for single authorship, as a group authoring tool. Once you introduce multiple authors, you need to think about the way primacy is given to the main author's entries - comments from others are nested away at a secondary level of access. The reader is directed to the first author entries, not the secondary comments. (Using the tagging function will be important if you want to find anything buried on the blog in a comment.)
If you’re working a group blog and all entries are of equal weight then everyone will need first author rights to post (upload files and rights to manage the site). Each author may tend to create new posts each time too, rather than adding an entry as a ‘comment’, so as to keep their posting at the highest level – not lost in the shadows of the blog. This will be interesting to track in the context of writing within a students' group blog which is assessed.
BTW: This group blog for Women in the Media and News has 50 authors - so anything is possible I guess!
You can see what we been up to here on the Timetoplay blog.
It’s interesting using a blog which is really a tool designed in the first instance for single authorship, as a group authoring tool. Once you introduce multiple authors, you need to think about the way primacy is given to the main author's entries - comments from others are nested away at a secondary level of access. The reader is directed to the first author entries, not the secondary comments. (Using the tagging function will be important if you want to find anything buried on the blog in a comment.)
If you’re working a group blog and all entries are of equal weight then everyone will need first author rights to post (upload files and rights to manage the site). Each author may tend to create new posts each time too, rather than adding an entry as a ‘comment’, so as to keep their posting at the highest level – not lost in the shadows of the blog. This will be interesting to track in the context of writing within a students' group blog which is assessed.
BTW: This group blog for Women in the Media and News has 50 authors - so anything is possible I guess!
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