photo via icanhascheezburger.com

Steve Hargadon discusses ten trends in the changing dynamics of our relationship to the internet in his blog post, Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education. Listing information overload as the second trend, he writes:

…when people ask me the answer to content overload, I tell them (counter-intuitively) that it is to produce more content. Because it is in the act of our becoming a creator that our relationship with content changes, and we become more engaged and more capable at the same time.

This is a useful lesson for anyone who remains skeptical about the merit of collaborative learning. Gone are the days of passive education, when it was enough merely to lecture and assign readings. Our students are already participating dynamically with web content outside the context of the online classroom.

By asking them to work actively with the course content, they are thinking actively about the content–thereby absorbing more actual information than if they were to try to absorb it by reading (or listening) alone. By doing and by creating, they are learning. They are joining in an ongoing community of scholars.

Activate your students’ learning: start discussions, assign reflection exercises, form them into groups to create a document on a wiki, ask them to find relevant online resources–there are many activities that can be done with online students. The key word is activity.

What are some of the ways you’ve engaged your students through acts of creation?

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 10:58 am and is filed under Articles, Course Activities, Pedagogical Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.