Education as a Conversation

Mark Pearson from Earlham College, Indiana posted a great idea for using social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks – del.icio.us) for student research.

Let’s take a small class with 16 students, and divide it into 4 groups of 4 students each. There are 4 topics to cover and each student in the group will research and write about one of these topics in their blog…

Then each group will have a wiki site where they bring together these topics and write about connections and interrelationships between them.

Each student will have their own del.icio.us user account and will accumulate bookmarks to useful web resources appropriate to their topic. Among the tags used for these bookmarks will be an agreed topic tag which is shared by all the students from each group researching the same topic. Thus the ‘freedom of information’ topic might have an agreed tag called ‘FreeInfo’. In this way students will share their bookmarks with others from different groups researching the same topic and by this means will establish a community of practice across groups.

This process will be easy to assess in del.icio.us since the teacher can easily select the tag used by each topic and see how many bookmarks were added by which student.