INTEGRATING BLOGS, PODCASTS, AND WIKIS INTO GEOLOGY CLASSES: TAKING THE CONVERSATION BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

Web pages have been a useful supplement to my lecture-based geology classes for over a decade. Audio podcasts of lectures complement web-based lecture notes and offer students an additional tool for reviewing material covered in class. The addition of podcasts to existing web-based lecture notes was well-received by students, without significant negative effects on lecture attendance. Blogs and wikis offer enhanced interactivity and have the potential to improve student engagement. Blogging software makes the process of publishing material to the web much easier than hand coding, and has the added benefit of automatically generating RSS feeds for content syndication. Web search engines and RSS aggregators make content produced in this manner much more discoverable and easy to track.

Using these tools, I have recently created "Ron's Geology Picks", a javascript-coded headline feed that draws selected syndicated web content (blog posts, news items, and search results) from my Google Reader RSS aggregator. This feature is embedded on the front page of each of my class websites and is updated throughout the day, keeping content fresh and providing students with ample starting material for required weekly discussion board postings. This fall I plan to expand my use of blogging software as a central content management system for my introductory geology class. This should allow for more frequent updating of class content, more integrated student discussion and feedback, better chronological organization of class materials, and access to all updates through RSS feeds.

Wikis are a form of collaboratively-edited, web-based documents. In the spring semester I organized an upper-level Geomorphology course around a wiki-model. I created “GeoWiki” (http://www.outcrop.org/wiki/Main_Page) using freely available MediaWiki software and seeded it with geology articles from Wikipedia. Students were required to critically evaluate existing articles and then edit them and/or create new articles describing geomorphic features and processes. As a final project students synthesized individual articles to create “textbook chapters” of topically related material. Students were encouraged to peer-review and edit each others articles. With refinement, a wiki-based class shows much potential.