This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Small college liberal arts students speak out on Tech
As an alumni I have been participating in an experimental class at Earlham College called "Social Impact of computer technology." The class members blogged their way through the class, with their blog entries the primary means of being assessed. Then at the end of class each of the 13 students recorded their thoughts on class and the technologies they'd learned about.
I was pretty interested to hear a small sample of undergrads had to say on these topics.
- Blogging: Mixed reviews. Students didn't like the tendency for rants and impolite comments, and many felt exposed by putting their work out for the whole world to see. On the other hand they said it was easy, and many liked getting feedback via comments. Trackback technology was universally held in contempt. It did seem that people thought blogging was the most interesting part of the class.
- Moodle: Pretty poor review. Apparently some bug around submitting homework seemed to have soured the class on Moodle. People did seem to enjoy at as a shared reference work.
- Social software: The only thing anyone had to say about social software was about del.icio.us. del.icio.us seemed to be new to everyone in the class, and nearly all liked it a lot and planned to continue using it. Flickr, et.al. didn't even rate a mention.
- Podcasting: Sounds like the general consensus is that it's interesting but hard and probably not worth the effort. Many people said podcasting is a good way find grammar errors in your writing, so I guess their assignment was to read their paper out-loud and record it as a podcast.
I decided not to link to the studnet blogs, because I'm not sure how long they will be around and reading some of those comments, I'm not sure the students would all welcome me doing that.