Online Teaching with Blogs and Wikis

Yesterday my colleagues Peter Duffy, Sal Humphreys and I put in a paper proposal for the Online Teaching conference here at QUT in September. This builds on the work Sal and I have been doing for the International Wiki Symposium in San Diego, but with a focus more on teaching and pedagogy aspects rather than the underlying teaching technologies. Here's the abstract:

Delivery in the Beyond - Possibilities for the Use of Blogs and Wikis in Education

In a knowledge economy it is no longer sufficient to use online learning and teaching technologies simply for the delivery of content to students. In the new environment, graduate capabilities increasingly and crucially identify the ability to effectively use new media technologies for collaborative and (co)creative purposes as well as for the critical assessment and evaluation of existing information. Higher education therefore must refocus its efforts, from a mere interest in developing information literacies to an emphasis on developing advanced creative, collaborative, and critical ICT literacies in students.

New online environments for this purpose are now becoming available for mainstream use in universities. This paper will focus specifically on blogs and wikis: two new content development and management technologies which enable an interactive and intercreative engagement amongst students and between students and teachers. Both enable desirable practices such as collaborative content creation, peer assessment, formative evaluation of student work, and individual as well as group reflection on learning experiences, and can be used in the development of authentic learning tasks. Presented will be a number of case studies which will outline the potential uses of such technologies in learning and teaching, describe the differences between both systems, and identify contexts in which they may be used effectively.

If this gets accepted I may not be there to deliver it, though, so Peter will have to take the honours - I should already be winging my way to the U.S. by that time if the Toronto conference comes through...