We’re looking at ways to attract more students into computing courses here at Lovett. We have a course that’s currently called eLife which is kind of a survey course in various applications, but it tends to have a small enrollment. I thought of refocusing it as a course based on some of the 21st century learning practices we’re discussing here. Here’s the blurb that I wrote with a colleague:
Digital Connections
This course is an exploration of our contemporary digital, networked, media-saturated world, incorporating blogs, wikis, social networks, podcasting and more. Students will work with digital media and forge connections with a global community of interest in a topic area of their choosing. The first part of the course addresses skills and techniques related to digital publishing, networking, and media production, and legal and ethical issues related to information sharing in the age of the internet. In the second part, each student builds a cumulative digital connections portfolio, engaging in research, media production and online dialogue related to their chosen topic.
The basic idea is that the kids (high school age) will create a blog to chronicle their explorations, seek out conversation with other bloggers and communities online, and create original work that expresses their interest in and opinion of something that they’re passionate about.
I’d like to solicit thoughts and comments on this. Do you see potential pitfalls? How might we approach the nuts-and-bolts teaching? How will we assess the learning, and how do we build the students’ portfolios? Are there specific tools, practices or communities that will be important to leverage?
