Presented at ELI Meetings

Critique_It is an online virtual classroom critique system originally developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Croquet and ported to Second Life. The critique is a rudimentary instructional methodology in the arts that can be applied to most other disciplines. Critique_It provides an environment for simulating authentic learning strategies and allowing the possibility for feedback from peers and experts from outside the campus.

How can we bring authentic learning, with real-world outcomes and assessments, into the history/social science classroom? This session will discuss the presenter's efforts to design and teach digital history seminars in partnership with museum professionals at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Monticello.

PrimaryAccess (www.primaryaccess.org) www.primaryaccess.org is a Web 2.0 digital tool developed at the University of Virginia's Center for Technology and Teacher Education that allows teachers to integrate primary source documents into the curriculum through student-created digital documentaries. This session will demonstrate the tool and discuss its use in the K–12 classroom to stimulate participant ideas for transferability to higher education.

This presentation focuses on a collaborative local history project between Duke University undergraduates and Durham eighth graders. Through their research seminar, Duke students conduct original research in local archives and then mentor eighth graders in how to use technology, particularly the Digital Durham website http://digitaldurham.duke.edu

Current theories suggest that learning is facilitated when embedded in the context in which it will be used, but the constraints of the traditional classroom make implementing this difficult to impossible. This session will focus on exploring how new technologies such as virtual environments can situate learning in a "real" virtual context, motivate students while helping them develop scientific habits of mind, and support teachers in leading complex scientific inquiries.

The presentation will give a development perspective to incorporating a virtual field trip into a newly created online entomology course. The field trip in the traditional course took students to a local farm to uncover the varying species of bugs at the farm, as well as where they lived and what they ate. As the course went online, the 3D virtual environment enabled virtual students to share experiences similar to those of the traditional students while learning the same content.

An online virtual case-based management system was developed to provide an interactive learning portal using simulated case scenarios, collaborative learning, decision support, and real-time assessment of student motivation and decision skills. Learn how to dynamically create and implement online case scenarios using virtual characters, speech, and other media-rich content.

To enhance the learning experience of a term paper, students were required to publish their papers in Wikipedia. Publishing for a large audience provided authentic feedback and encouraged students to do their best work. Using Wikipedia also allowed students to connect with a vibrant community and share their knowledge by making their papers publicly accessible.

Citizen journalism refers to a wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute to information or commentary about news events. The practice epitomizes the belief that the experiences of people personally involved with an issue present a different -- and often more complete -- picture of events than can be derived from the perspective of an outsider.

At the ELI Annual Meeting in San Antonio, ELI put this innovation into practice, arming a team of five "citizen journalists" with video cameras to capture important themes that emerged during the event. The team -- Gardner Campbell, Cyprien Lomas, Patricia McGee, Deborah Keyek-Franssen, and Liv Gjestvang -- shot footage from the event as well as participant interviews. This final video summary, created with the help of Instructional Technology graduate students from the University of Texas-San Antonio, was presented on the final day of the meeting.

Students in a comparative political media course used web 2.0 technologies including blogs, wikis, podcasts, YouTube, folksonomies, and syndication to explore the emerging landscape of political media. They explored how and when to use each tool, technical production in the tools, and more generally where political media is headed.