The summer of 2012 was transformational. The summer Olympics were held in London, England. The US witnessed one of the hottest summers on record. The Curiosity Rover landed on Mars. Carley Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” was the official summer anthem. And campers everywhere flocked to Camp Magic Macguffin for a summer of hijinx, mystery, and animated GIFs.
DS106 was my first exposure to a networked course. It was a class that demanded participation in the community through a host of creative assignments, tweeting, blogging, reading/comments on the blogs of others, and animated GIFs, animated GIFs, animated GIFs!
Dr. Amy Nelson lead a workshop called Networking Your Hybrid Humanities Course on the last day of AltFest. Several of Dr. Nelson’s classes are hybrid classes. Students meet face-to-face, but they also spend time analyzing and interacting with primary sources. The syllabus for the fall 2014 Russian History course emphasizes the role of the student in defining the class….
“Much of this work will take place in a networked learning environment, which will use blogging, Twitter, and other learningtechnologies to construct, elaborate and refine the contours and content of the course.”
The blogging assignments are intended to leverage the freely accessible resources of the World Wide Web as well as the digitized collections of the Virginia Tech libraries in order to:o Develop your skills in historical analysiso Develop your skills identifying, using and citing historical sourceso Develop understanding of the key developments and dynamics of Soviet History
Screenshot of comments on the mother blog
Sometimes a class can have over 30 students, which means over 30 blogs, which means over 30 posts to read and leave comments. Nelson has an editorial board in place to help with comments. This team also selects the posts that appear in the coveted Editor’s Choice spot. Students on the editorial board also contribute to the body of knowledge the class creates over the semester. You can read a couple of examples here and here
The Editor’s Choice slider
Selections for the slider are posted (in a perfect world) every Wednesday during a semester. Nelson said she notices an uptick in traffic on Wednesday afternoons. Students check out the mother blog to see what posts have been chosen for the week.
Dr. Nelson builds courses that are engaging and participatory. She and her students leverage the best the web has to offer. They make use of open educational resources. They share their analysis and thinking in the open through their blogs and comments.
"I wanted students to get the most out of what the web had to offer" @purling4peas #vcualtfest #networkedCourse
— Steve Greenlaw (@sgreenla) May 15, 2015
You can find links to student blogs, blog post guidelines, mother blogs, archived class notes, and more on this Google Doc.
Thanks so much for highlighting this #networked course format! I am always looking for ways to help students leverage the web to incorporate high-value openly accessible resources as well as more specialized databases provided by the library, and having the support of Indie Librarians for that piece is a huge plus.