Engaging Students with Engaging Tools

Abstract

This article records my experiences teaching a new course in early 2009 at Dickinson College, a four-year liberal arts college in Pennsylvania serving around 2,300 undergraduates. The course emphasized newer and emerging media and technologies such as satellite television, the Internet, and mobile telephony. We particularly studied blogging and the role of social media in self-expression and activism. To better understand the read-write web and social media, students were required to write blogs as well as follow blogs using an aggregator. The course was delivered via a wiki rather than a learning management system, to offer a more open learning environment. I also encouraged students to use Diigo for social bookmarking. In a class of 21, there was naturally a range of responses to the different technologies used, from enthusiastic embrace through indifference to active resistance. But student feedback, formal and informal, was overall more positive than negative, and in some cases strongly supportive. Several students have continued to use tools introduced in the course. I expect to apply the lessons learned in future iterations of this course and in others, including how to better serve students who do not readily embrace all the techniques and technologies used.