As I mentioned in class, I feel that a social bookmarking site would be the perfect compliment to the class I TA'ed for last semester: International Issues in Conservation. And the more I think about it, the more I believe I'll actually implement this technology next spring when I will likely TA once more. Most of the issues we discussed in that class - and we made sure it was certainly a DISCUSSION based class - were 1) current, and 2) controversial. These attributes lend themselves well to online breaking news articles, editorials, scientific publications, and outraged responses. We encouraged students to post these to ELC if they came across a relevant article, and a few even did. But as we all know, ELC is pretty much a no-fun zone in terms of ease of access and the all-important fun factor. Establishing Pinterest boards for a shared class experience might be more attractive to students to get involved and contribute to the class's overall learning. I imagine we could have 2 boards to start off, created and populated with initial posts by course instructors, where the first board contains any current conservation issue on an international scale while the second board offers a place to put articles or event announcements about local conservation. Off the top, students might post, on the latter board, an announcement about an Eco Film Festival being held on campus or a link to download a pocket guide (or iPhone app) that tells you if the sushi you're about to order is sustainable.
Another more complex idea is to create a separate board for each group of students that must work on a semester project. Each group is responsible for covering one international issue (e.g., fracking, ecotourism in the tropics, illegal harvest of endangered species), and group members could post articles they find on their boards throughout the semester. This practice could make the work each group (or person) was doing more public, which could motivate students to search for interesting, high-quality information, and also identify the slackers among groups. Since the posts could be seen by the whole class, there could even be a separate exercise where each student is responsible for summarizing and critiquing an issue presented on another group's board. As of now, these ideas are a little green, but let's remember the old saying once more: there's no judgment in brainstorming.
I like your idea for using boards to explore and international issue!
ReplyDeleteLove these ideas! Have you thought about conducting a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning study about this activity? Let me know if you want to chat about it!
ReplyDeleteSince Pinterest is visually-based, I think in addition to using it for posting articles you could even bring it into the classroom. For example, say you're teaching them about stakeholders and you have some exercise where they have to identify stakeholders in a situation. Could they find and post a representative photo of their stakeholder or their interest in the issue (a pic of pollution or someone drinking water, etc.), then in class give a 30-second "why I chose this" explanation?
ReplyDeleteI'm considering bringing it into the classroom for some of my own things, since I really only use Powerpoints for visual backup and this would be that, but student generated. Which seems neat!