Talk:Curriculum
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How can all the energy that undergraduate and graduate students expend writing and researching more directly serve the advance of knowledge and understanding? Let us explore whether wasted creative energies in education might be put to better use through astute intellectual use of information and communication technologies in education (ICTE). Please contribute your ideas and suggestions to its development.
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[edit] Study
[edit] Generative questions originating the article
- How do existing instructional patterns serve to advance knowledge and understanding?
- They stock young minds with information and ideas and provide them with disciplines of inquiry.
- They impart the know-how and standards of one or more academic and professional fields.
- Where in the process is energy and talent expended with little tangible result?
- Apprentice activities (paper writing, exam taking) consume much student and faculty energy primarily with intangible results in the form of a sound preparation for the future.
- Can social software lead to an instructional process in which the energy expended in apprentice activities will culminate in tangible results of substantial value to the intellectual community?
- The need to accumulate experience in trying to make this happen.
[edit] Key points to make
[edit] Key resources to draw on
There is a burgeoning literature on ICT in higher education. It would be helpful to identify the small part of it that deals with the challenge of introducing ICT into the instructional process in ways that make that process more effective in advancing the state of knowledge and understanding. Most of it is directed at making the achievement of current instructional goals more efficient in the sense either of meeting them with less expenditure of time and energy or in the sense of raising them while holding the expenditure of time and energy constant. What is the literature on how information technologies deployed in the instructional mission of the university can significantly improve its research mission?
[edit] Scope and tone of coverage
I plan to add a section to this page (or a new page) about using StudyPlace (a wiki) for a course vs. using a courseware/lcms like Moodle or Blackboard. I think that the main point is if you want tight control, use Moodle, if you want a course to be free and open, use SP. Matt 10:03, 27 July 2007 (EDT)
[edit] Talk
[edit] Page Naming
I find it difficult to understand why courses continue to be named on StudyPlace with reference to their TC identification, e.g. A HH4901. If one of the goals of StudyPlace is to channel formal coursework into the general, informal StudyPlace intellectual environment, this convention would seem stifling. In keeping with the example above, why not just give the course an SP name of Humanistic Studies in a Digital Commons? UPDATE: I have read the material on page naming at Help:Courses, and now understand better the rationale for naming courses as they are. Nonetheless, I think this practice has the effect of isolating course content from the rest of the site, which is precisely what StudyPlace aims not to do.
nee2102 09:59, 21 June 2007 (EDT)
- This raises an interesting question. It might be cool were the course able to blend completely into the commons. Certainly humanistic studies in a digital commons would be more informative to someone looking at the "all pages" list than A_HH6577. As I think about it, the only real problem that might arise would be, say, with something like sociology of education, which is probably offered at many institutions (all of which will in due course use StudyPlace). But then it could be sociology of education-tc,sociology of education-hgse,sociology of education-suse, etc. Is there a value in having the official id of a course associated with its materials? Robbie McClintock 19:17, 22 June 2007 (EDT)
[edit] Site Support or no Site Support?
There is a contradiction on this page, between the using SP for course assignments and using SP as a course platform sections. One section encourages contacting site administrators, while the other suggests that there is basically no site support. This is confusing and needs to be resolved.
nee2102 11:04, 21 June 2007 (EDT)
- I lost track of things and did not mean to leave the material archived below as part of the current Curriculum page. I think that takes care of the contradiction. We should answer questions and facilitate finding hands-on help, without becoming a service organization! Robbie McClintock 19:28, 22 June 2007 (EDT)
[edit] Archived stuff
[edit] Using StudyPlace as a course platform
See the pages below for examples of how StudyPlace can be used to launch a full, publicly accessible course site. You are welcome to build your own!
- Readings in Communication Theory and Social Thought Robbie McClintock and Frank Moretti, Instructors
- The History of Communication Frank Moretti, Instructor
StudyPlace started with several purposes, one of which was to explore how well faculty members, who were modestly adept technically, could develop and maintain a functional course platform with minimal support by a production staff. Using StudyPlace as a course platform entails some work — learning how to use MediaWiki reasonably well and designing course support materials to suit your purposes. Compared to more structured platforms, you will find MediaWiki flexible in use and you can make development a continuous process, year-by-year, easily. It is easy for students to work actively within the course framework you set up. There are limitations — everything is open to everyone, so don't try to make a gradebook or a quizzing system. Threaded discussions will work, but participants need to internalize the discipline of following the threads in clear way rather than rely on the constraints of a structured tool.
So, if you want to run your course from within StudyPlace, go to it! You will find a helpful set of templates explained in Help:Courses. It is a peer production environment and that means beyond such help pages, there is no staff support except in the cases of systems breakdown or upgrade or a problem with the MediaWiki skin (the left sidebar and the top tabs and stuff above them). But you can see everything going on, look at the source code for everything in the StudyPlace site, and tinker with almost all of it. That makes the site a powerful learning tool about itself, and the community of peers on it will generally respond (in due course, at least) to most discussion queries you may plant on various talk pages.
