Elit 2.0: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

Do you want to teach Web 2.0 technologies but need some exemplary creative texts for students to "read" as examples and/or illustrations of the tool's creative potential?

Check out ELit: A Guide to Literary Works on Social Software

"While students are still developing literacies in new technologies it is important that their adoption involves more than just accepting the software at interface value. What these technologies are and can be has yet to be decided and this set of electronic literary works offers an artistic exploration of their possibilities that will enrich the quest for software literacy."
From: WRT: Writer Response Theory: a blog and podcast dedicated to discussing text arts forms

Pedagogy 2.0

Great article on how Web 2.0 can create pedagogy 2.0. Here's a snippet. The rest of the article is at Innovate, a journal on online education.

"Pedagogy 2.0 is defined by:

• Content: Microunits that augment thinking and cognition by offering diverse perspectives and representations to learners and learner-generated resources that accrue from students creating, sharing, and revising ideas;
• Curriculum: Syllabi that are not fixed but dynamic, open to negotiation and learner input, consisting of bite-sized modules that are interdisciplinary in focus and that blend formal and informal learning;
• Communication: Open, peer-to-peer, multifaceted communication using multiple media types to achieve relevance and clarity;
  Process: Situated, reflective, integrated thinking processes that are iterative, dynamic, and performance and inquiry based;
• Resources: Multiple informal and formal sources that are rich in media and global in reach;
• Scaffolds: Support for students from a network of peers, teachers, experts, and communities; and
• Learning tasks: Authentic, personalized, learner-driven and learner-designed, experiential tasks that enable learners to create content.

With this learner-based, communal, media-rich, flexible approach, Pedagogy 2.0 uses social software tools to enable the development of dynamic communities of learning through connectivity, communication, and participation."

Online mini-lectures

Here's an article in the Chronicle on the value of creating "mini-lectures" when converting a traditional class to online. A snippet is below, and the rest of the article is at http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i41/41a00901.htm.

"Dalton A. Kehoe, an associate professor of communication studies at York University, in Toronto, has for decades won teaching awards and praise for his lectures. So when he was asked to do his first online course, a couple of years ago, he was excited to head into a studio to capture his 50-minute talks on video.
When the recordings went online, however, they were anything but hits. The main complaint: They were much too long.
"It was the most extremely boring thing my students had ever seen," Mr. Kehoe acknowledges. His course evaluations, usually glowing, grew dismal.
"I had to sit to down and look at these lectures and realize that when you're looking at someone online as a talking head and shoulders in video, you just want to kill yourself after about 20 minutes," he says with a laugh.
So, for the first time in his 40 years of teaching, he decided to overhaul his lectures. He broke them up into 20-minute segments, each focusing on a narrow topic."