Week #8 - Wicked or Wonderful Wiki's? What Rights & Responsibilities Do I Have?

This week was a mixed bag for me.  I must admit that I think I am creating more work for myself than I need to in this course.  I am spending 3 times the amount of time doing the work for this program than I have done for any of my other programs!  Why?  For an elective, I should be spending not as much time....Well, I am starting to see why I am and why I am glad I am spending this time.

Centennial College
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The ideas generated through the learning over the last 9 weeks, as given me new perspective in how to present my classes.  Not only have I learned to be a good online learner, I have learned how to incorporate many new tools into my January 2014 courses.  I have found my teaching to be a bit outdated lately and incorporating the new tools into my existing classes has added some new excitement  - not just for me but also for my students.  In particular, I have been asked to merge two courses into one - what an amazing opportunity to create something new and exciting using some of these new tools.  I am currently working on this project and should have details in the next two weeks - I will share it then.

My current featured classes include one that I have taught for 15 years now.  I modify the content every semester, but I haven't yet made it digitally 'sexy' or exciting for my students.  In this class, my students create a marketing plan for a hospitality organization of their choosing - either real or made up.  To date all submissions have been either hard copy or electronic submission.  It's hard and a lot of work, but ultimately after 15 weeks, the students produce a great business document. During the semester, I always take my students 'temperature' - get a feel for how they are doing - struggles, successes etc.

Power Struggles

I generally do it with an online survey which always gives me some new ideas.  I conducted my usual survey recently, and the students were asking for more interactive work, my play, and more examples.  So I conducted an interactive JigSaw exercise with them on Marketing Mixes (what I call the Marketing P's).  Well they loved it and I asked them each to post their groups findings to our discussion section on eCentennial (our Moodle).

Working through the Wiki exercises, I realized and had another AHA moment (my second one this semester).  I could incorporate weekly group 'research' and the term project could be done using Wiki's that the students create.  I was inspired by the Discover Exercises link on the K12 Learning site.  These student examples, although none of a college or university level, showed the potential these Wiki's have - especially for projects.  I will be re-writing my course projects this week to incorporate and post them here over the next few weeks.  I started already by creating a Hospitality Sales & Marketing Curated ScoopIt! site to share with my students...so excited.

Also this week, I had the pleasure of working with my classmate +Mary Lou Siviero for our Google Docs Assignment on Digital Health & Wellness.  Working on this presentation virtually was very rewarding and challenging as we had so much information shared through our Evernote collection, yet only 500 words to share it with.  We worked hard and we worked well together and we utilized our individual strengths to create a fantastic assignment!  Thanks +Mary Lou Siviero - Great Job!

I also continued building the ScoopIt! curation site for our class ADED1P32 for class review at will - it's a great exercise for me to refer back to throughout the course.  I am also finding great articles for our curation site through my Feedly including this article Three Types of Assignments.  It is evident in this that I am on the right track when it comes to my own classroom assignments. 

So my final work (other than this blog) was our submission for Digital Responsibilities Forum about Digital Rights and Responsibilities.  I didn't find any of the readings particularly earth shattering (and truthfully rather repetitive), but I did find them helpful, informative,

Questions: Spring Board Thinking

and a springboard to bringing many of my own students into the realm of becoming digital citizens. I was absolutely horrified at the lack of Digital Responsibility a large number of my post-graduate students had.  I will be working on this moving forward.

Finally, an honourable mention goes to my experiencing Google Hangout on Tuesday.  I met +Caitlin Munn and a few other fellow students, and perhaps we can do the hangout again soon.  I can see doing this with some of my fellow teachers at Centennial to solidify the collaborative effort on our course outline reworks.

Well that is it for this week - I'm exhausted and exhilarated and ready to start Week 9.  Good learning and tie in between Wiki's and Digital Responsibility.  I can see how crucial the two are to creating a positive and digitally responsible experience for teachers and students.