Gearing up for spring semester?  Interested in trying something different? Instructors have been incorporating wikis into their courses to allow students to work collaboratively, and wikis are available through Blackboard at Duke.  However, wikis can be used to organize the entire course.

Sandra Porter shares her experiences using a wiki (PBwiki) to teach bioinformatics in her blog, Discovering Biology in a Digital World.  She describes how she set up her course, using her syllabus as the main page with links to her materials.  She says she “used to try and use Blackboard for this, but pbwiki is so much easier to use. “  For assessments, she used Google forms embedded into the course wiki.

Dr. Porter generously shares her lessons learned along the way.  She described a problem caused by a web browser, and finally, she describes a better way to manage files and folders within her course.   In addition, she answers readers’ questions in the comments.  Read all 3 entries for a thoughtful introduction to using a wiki to organize a course.  Dr. Porter currently develops instructional materials for 21st century biology at Geospiza Inc.

The adventurous proponent of open (notebook) science, Jean-Claude Bradley, has been teaching organic chemistry using a wiki for several years at Drexel University.  Fittingly, his courses are open: browse Organic Chemistry 1 or Organic Chemistry 2 for ideas.   He uses Wikispaces to host his wikis, and accompanies the courses with blog posts.

Wikis are wonderful tools for collaboration, which may be ideal for students to learn.  However, as Dr. Porter details, wiki pages can have permissions set so that they are private within the class, or private between the instructor and the student.  In addition, because the instructor can access the page history, changes can be monitored.  Will a wiki fit your course?

Have you seen this around Duke’s campus?  It’s a model of a mock rock outcrop, to be measured and described by students in Dr. Alex Glass’s EOS 11: Dynamic Earth course.  Students are using GPS to find and mark the stations (there are 60 around campus), each of which provides data on the type of rock, its dip (the angle at which it tilts into the ground), and its compass orientation (known as the “strike”).   This data will make it possible to infer the (virtual) bedrock geology under the Duke Campus.  Students will pool their data to map the rock layers, and then predict where oil might be found.  Mapping “strike and dip” is a common activity for professional geologists.  Dr. Glass constructed the stations and planned this activity for his students to have real, hands-on experience using GPS, making measurements and observations, inferring underlying structure from surface observations, and making predictions, just like professional geologists.  Students are participating now; we’ll find out what they think soon.

This project was funded by a Jump Start Grant from the Center for Instructional Technology.

Blackboard, Inc. sponsors a program every year “to help faculty use e-Learning technology more effectively by identifying and disseminating best practices for designing engaging online courses.”  Blackboard’s 2009 “Exemplary Course Program” is now open and accepting submissions through 1/12/2009.

The Program web site includes a rubric describing the criteria for assessing exemplary online courses, the principles in which could be adjusted to apply to any course web site. In addition, a list of Exemplary Course winners from previous years on the site may provide ideas useful to other online faculty (note that NCSU was one of the 2008 winners for their course “Organization & Operation of Training & Development Programs”).

Have a quick look at the Program site – you might find something useful to help you expand the use of your Blackboard site or any course web site.

Dr. Peter Haff’s class here at Duke used Google Earth for their final project in the American Southwest (EOS 181S.01).  They  took a field trip to the Mojave Desert in October to study geologic features, including volcanism, tectonics, soils and weathering, paleo-lakes, wind-blown sand and dust, landslides, and alluvial fans.  Prior to the field trip, the students selected biological, geological and astronomical topics to prepare for presentations in the field.  At the end of the semester, students took the Earth and Ocean Sciences department (and me) on a virtual tour of their field trip using Google Earth.  We followed the track of the trip to see the geological features and embedded photos and information supplied by the students.  The students took turns explaining the features illustrated in Google Earth and their photos, including dunes, granite outcrops, vegetation zoning, desert pavement, dry lakes, badlands, bighorn sheep, craters, fault scarps, petroglyphs, a borax mine, relic shorelines, lava tubes and alien fresh jerky.

The students and Dr. Haff collaborated to create the Google Earth file, pooling their pictures and information.  The students found that using Google Earth enhanced their learning because it provided:

• a sense of scale
• the ability to make measurements
• an overview of the area
• context for what they were seeing
• orientation.

Read more about this course in Duke Magazine.

More information, examples and tutorials about Google Earth can be found on their website;  or, contact CIT for help incorporating Google Earth into your course.