Friday, August 5, 2011

Note-taking in Blended Learning

I was surprised that there wasn't any mention of wikis in the assigned blog posts here and here. I've seen some of the programs mentioned in Ningthoujam's article, but they all seem to be focused on individual note taking (though I recognize that some of the programs have sharing capabilities.)

What I'm really interested in is encouraging group note-taking, a class project that everyone contributes to. And a wiki seems to be the easiest and best way to do that. I was very much inspired in thus by Richard Buckland's video.



I've tried requiring a class notes wiki in two classes so far, one in the spring and one this summer, and what I've discovered is that students have NO idea what I'm asking for. In the middle of the summer class, I asked everyone why they weren't adding to the class notes, and the response was, "We don't understand what you want from us." They can't envision what class notes would look like or be used for. Part of it is that I find few students take extensive class notes at all. And even those who do see them as completely private, something that you might share with a friend who missed class, but that's it. (An assumption shared by the articles on note-taking programs we read.) So I'm going to have to do a lot more to introduce and encourage this activity, before I see anything like what I was hoping for, which was essentially a summary of the class topics and examples of the day.

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