Some ideas for using blogs and wikis in teaching college science, from a session I moderated with Brian Switek (a science blogger and ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University) on Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond at ScienceOnline09.  These ideas were generated and discussed by the session participants:

• Use a blog to post notes from guest speakers, librarians, or add resources from your lecture
• Require students to post to a course blog and comment on each others posts
• Post supplemental material for the course (links to multimedia and more information)
• Use a wiki to organize course material
• Use a wiki for student to student communication (for collaborative projects)
• Connect class material to the world by connecting to relevant headlines and news stories
• Construct an assignment where students are required to find relevant headlines and post, connect to the course material and create a concept map within a course wiki
• Students can blog course notes, after they have edited and reviewed the material (example and discussion by Lou FCD, who participated in this discussion)
• Students can use their term papers as blog posts
• Students blog during a field trip, perhaps with video; this increases student focus on the trip as they know they must blog, and can see posts made by other students (example from Duke’s Marine Conservation Biology field trip).  The blog may be mined in the future for data on changes over time.
• Build up a resource for field trips that revisit sites by adding notes to a wiki
• Use blogs with relevant content as a resource for exploring a subject
• Use a blog to run course discussions as a supplement for in class discussions, to encourage all students to participate
• Use a blog for group project to keep track of what worked during the project
• Use a blog or wiki to share links, possibly making it competitive (who can find the best links)
• Create a space on the web to discuss controversial course topics
• Connect students from different universities
• Have students read and summarize papers in a blog, perhaps contribute to ResearchBlogging.org
• Keep a research notebook or field journal online
• Have students use a blog to create a website, like an online science fair project

One student who was homeschooled and found blogs useful for exploring topics of interest to him pointed out that it can be difficult to stay focused on the web.  He shared some tips:  monitor yourself to make sure you are on task, and take frequent breaks to refocus (take a walk, eat some fruit).

One of the participants who uses a blog to post his course notes, wrote about his own ideas from the session, in his blog, Crowded head, cozy bed.

If you are at Duke, call us at the Center for Instructional Technology for ideas and help incorporating any of these ideas in your course.

Update:

Kevin Zelnio participated in this session and wrote about it in his blog, Deep Sea News .

Mason Posner teaches anatomy and physiology and marine biology, and is experimenting with blogs in his senior capstone biology course.  You can follow his experiment at their central course blog.

As part of conference for scientists, bloggers, science educators, and journalists; (ScienceOnline09), Stacey Baker and her students (mostly 9th grade) answered questions about how they use technology to learn biology in high school, and what the students thought about it in a session: Science online – middle/high school perspective or: “How the Facebook generation does it”. Their photo is from their class blog.

Here are some of the tools and thoughts they shared:

The students write a class blog about biology, Extreme Biology,  which won the 2008 Edublog Award for Best Class Blog! Caitlin shared her enthusiasm for the blog before the session, saying how motivating it was when people outside the class commented on their blog, especially scientists.

Students in AP biology use Twitter to pose questions while doing homework, students say “it’s fun and easy and you get instant access”. The teacher sets expectations for the students, by telling them that she will not always be online, and that their help should come from their peers. One student really liked twitter, and created a separate account that could be public. He talked enthusiastically about getting “tweets” from NASA.  Picture shows tweets from Mars Phoenix.  

The students were asked why they would communicate through text if they could talk by phone. They answered that when you write text, you can think through what you want to say first, so it saves time. It’s also easy to multitask while using text to communicate and you can talk to more than one person at a time. They generally check to see if someone is online before calling, and will text someone to ask them to get online (to communicate online rather than texting, which may cost).

The class also uses Ning, a social networking tool. Accounts on Ning are free to educators, others have ad content. Participants must belong to the group to post things and comment. There is a ning network called Synapse for connecting biology educators world wide.  Another example of the use of Ning is Sean Nash’s principles of biology course. This site is a collaborative network linking Benton High School and MWSU via the dual-credit course: “Principles of Biology.”

What about using Facebook for your course? Students described the Creepy Treehouse phenomenon, where they are uncomfortable with teachers using spaces they consider theirs. Students said that they’d make a separate account in facebook if a teacher wanted to use facebook. Just as it’s awkward for students to see a teacher outside of school, it is similarly awkward to have a teacher in a social online environment. Although ning is also a social network, it’s not weird to use it for school because it was introduced in school. Students are introduced to facebook as social website and don’t mix the two. Participants seemed to agree that teachers can “friend” the students on Facebook after they have left the school; teachers find this is a good way to keep up with their former students. One teacher pointed out that you can join a common group without friending people to be able to keep up with them, and can then select what you share.