Chris Long is hosting a dialogue between his students and students from Boston College over at his Digital Dialogue blog. In addition, Marina McCoy, philosophy professor from Boston College, is now guest posting on the blog. There has been talk of the power of blogs to extend (remove?) the boundaries of the classroom, and thanks to adventurous folks like Chris Long and Marina McCoy, we are actually seeing it here at PSU and BC.
What Chris Long is doing at Digital Dialogue is fascinating and I have been trying to get my head together to write about it here for quite some time. The Digital Dialogue is a place for Dr. Long, his undergraduate students, his graduate students, and now Dr. McCoy to, "co-author a living document". Comments are open to the world. Next time Dr. Long is teaching, his students will continue to build on that document. Perhaps students from this semester will continue to participate in the shaping this document in semesters to come. The posts and discussion on the blog shape the discussion in class. The class is really much more of a two way experience than it has been before the blog. The students are now writing for an audience other than just the professor. They are writing for the whole class, other philosophy students, and potentially the whole world. This has changed the character and quality of the student's work.
Dr. Long has an outstanding presentation on the pedagogy of blogging based on his experience using blogs in teaching to encourage community, ongoing critical reflection, writing for an audience, all the while blurring boundaries between "student and teacher, semester and lifetime, practice and theory, world and classroom."
I believe we are seeing an emergence of a new model for teaching and learning.
My knowledge of what is going on at Digital Dialogue is based on discussions I've had with Chris and seeing his presentation. Chris, if you are reading this, don't be afraid to correct me. I'd hate to be misrepresenting what you are doing.
One more thing, for the open educational resource crowd: With all this discussion and material being captured, and the world being enabled to not only view, but participate, the Digital Dialogue is an open educational resource. Not only is Marina McCoy and her class able to take advantage of this OER, but they are in turn adding to it and helping build it. This is not the typical OER model of a bunch of text book pages or multimedia assets. This is something different.
Links:
Thanks for this, Brad. You have it exactly right about the strategy to perform research and teaching in the open, with others, using the blogs at PSU platform as the site of digital community.
I would add that all of this is based on the conviction that learning happens in community and that technology can be used to cultivate communities of learning that cut across boundaries in all sorts of ways.
I tried to articulate some of my thinking behind the practice as well as show something of the practice itself in the presentation you mentioned entitled, Integrating Teaching and Research with Technology.
None of this, however, would be possible without the work you, Brad, have done to enable me to develop a digital blog space that fits my teaching and research ideals. You have always been committed to the idea that the pedagogy should drive the technology. This is critical.
Further, I very much appreciate your ongoing commitment to open education. Penn State was founded as a land grant institution designed to make education more accessible as a public good. I see this as the continuation and transformation of this important tradition in a digital age.