Category: Blogs and Wikis

Link to: MUT 112 – Music Theory I @ Oakland University

This site has pulled together a variety of interactive tools to support a music theory course, including a series of podcasts organized as MUT 112 Radio with a nice flash interface. Listening assignments are set up as blog entries that allow students to comment and get responses from the faculty member. There’s also a class wiki to address broad questions from the perspective of looking at “music theory as exactly that – a theory, or more accurately a collection of theories on how music works and is structured.”

This will be an interesting course to watch. The blog is already getting some substantive comments, and the wiki isn’t particularly welll developed since it’s so early in the class. Between the wiki, the listening assignments and the actual compositions the students are doing, looks like a very demanding course, but one with real potential to use read/write tools to engage students.

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web: A List Apart

A List Apart is required reading for most of the web developers and designers I know. The comments made about this article on writing for the “living web” imply that many bloggers found the piece to be common sense or common knowledge, but I think it’s a great piece for new web writers–like most of my students. I’ll definitely use this piece as background as part of the blogging assignment for my course this fall.

I think it’s important to students who are using blogs, wikis, Flickr and other social tools to understand that they are participating in a medium that is much different than a book. This new web isn’t made up of “finished, unchanging creations–as polished and as fixed as books or posters”.

For students writing for a class assignment, the following is good advice, though difficult to follow:

If your site belongs to a product, a project, or an enterprise [or a class], you must still find a way to represent its passion and excitement. If you do not understand why your product is compelling or comprehend the beauty of your enterprise, find the reason or [consider not taking the class.

Other good advice for students is to “let the story unfold.” Too few web sites feature good stories built with the tools that creative writers and journalists have developed over the years to gain and sustain interest. This section has some good reminders for experienced writers, and suggests some interesting exercises and assignments for course work.

Seven Things You Should Know About Wikis

I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities of Wiki-Wikis for years, but have always had a hard time getting past the inherent ugliness of most implementations and the difficulty of getting nontechnical users comfortable with the interface. The succes of Wikipedia and the increased use of more attractive skins and templates seem to be moving Wikis into the mainstream. The Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) has released a nice summary of the software that can be used to introduce the technology to faculty and students.

This is a part of the NLI’s “7 Things You Should Know About…” series which provides concise information on a variet of learning practices and technologies. Each fact sheet focuses on a single practice in a common format: What is it? Who’s doing it? How does it work? Why is it significant? What are the downsides? Where is it going? What are the implications for teaching and learning?

Other technologies covered in the series include:

• social bookmarking
• little clickers
• podcasting.