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But is it Hamtech 2.0?Hamilton students as a whole are not the gotta-have-it-before-it- hits-the-mainstream technology wizards found at today's tech schools. Dave Smallen, vice president for information technology at the College, says, "We don't necessarily get the students who go to MIT and who have those [unduly high] kinds of expectations. Hamilton students are users of technology, but they are not pushing the edge in large numbers." Instead, most students slowly incorporate the capabilities of the 2.0 technology into their lives and work. First, they hear the fuss over blogs, YouTube, SecondLife or Wikipedia (ironically, almost always from mainstream news sources) and begin to grow curious. Soon, their thirst for information about this new technology becomes insatiable (the need typically is correlated to the amount of work due the next day) and they try to learn more. They poke around the Internet; they see what's out there. Almost always, they end up adopting some aspect of Web 2.0 into some part of their lives, and they find something that interests them as a result. Henry Frankievitch '11 found, "There's so much content on YouTube that I find myself using it all of the time … to watch short, viral-type videos that I can't get from more traditional or more trustworthy sources like cable TV, news sites and iTunes." But while some students devote themselves to new media, Hamiltonians are not, in huge numbers, posting information to the Web in the form of blogs, Web journals or videos. Perhaps many students are just too busy to devote that much of their own time to social networking. And perhaps that explains why some professors require students to post to blogs. If posting is required for a class, it will blend social time and academic time, increasing the effective time for learning. Hi Professor, I could use some help with…Remarkable as it may seem, professors are often the people on campus most likely to keep up — and stay up — with Web 2.0 and its benefits. Many of them use the technology to field late-night questions their students have while studying for tests, writing papers or working on problem sets. And a few are helping to pioneer much wider use. John Adams, a visiting professor of communication, tries to apply tools designed for social networking as pedagogical tools. Besides requiring the use of discussion boards and blogs for classes, "I teach a number of courses that engage visual rhetoric," he says. "In addition to YouTube, I use AmericanRhetoric.com. It has video and sound clips of public speeches." And for the environmentally conscious, he says, "one advantage of Blackboard is that it enables a more or less paperless writing environment — the students upload papers and I download them, comment on them, grade them, and upload them back to Blackboard." |
The Digital DivideI love my mother dearly, and she's a very intelligent lady, but she is hopeless when it comes to computers. More ...I Know What I Know, You Know?It's pretty safe to say that most professors aren't going to accept Wikipedia as a source for one of your major research papers. More ...Confessions of an Online JunkieIn the second semester of my freshman year, I was fortunate enough to take a film/literature class where the bulk of my classroom participation was graded based on an online discussion board More ... |
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