“How do I work? I grope.”
- Albert Einstein

We often characterize learning as a structured, choreographed experience with a clear destination in mind. In many cases, this is the most efficient and effective way for students to understand a new concept or idea.  In other cases, though, it can be quite helpful for students to explore a topic in a more open-ended or less structured manner. As they explore a topic on their own, they often develop a greater sense of ownership in their learning and can often make surprising connections between ideas.

Key features of the strategy
When we ask students to explore a topic, we’re really asking for something between answering a set of questions at the end of a textbook chapter and conducting a more formal research project. It requires students to go more in depth than in the former, but is not as time consuming or formal as the latter. It also encourages students to take ownership of their learning. As they determine how they will explore the topic, the resources they consult, and possibly the output they generate, the learning is more student-directed than a more guided approach. The key for an exploration to be productive is to have a clear focus of what you hope students take away from the experience.

Once you have determined a focus, the next challenge is to frame the exploration with an engaging and productive question. It should be open-ended enough that there isn’t a single answer, but not so broad that it would be difficult for students to adequately explore in a reasonable amount of time. You might then provide them with a collection of resources (online resources, articles, books, etc.) within which they might explore the question or encourage them to explore on their own.

Examples and Variations
Structured Scavenger Hunt
A structured scavenger hunt can be the most efficient way for students to explore a topic. In this approach, you are very directive with both what questions students will explore and the resources they will draw upon.  For example, students might be challenged to review a collection of law briefs to find seven different examples of precedent related to a particular legal concept. While there is some room for students to pick particular examples, this type of exploration will tend to be very convergent in terms of student understanding. This is the kind of experience that could possibly be completed as an in-class activity.

Topic web
A more graphic and emergent way to explore a topic is through the development of a topic web. This is a simple graphic organizer with prompts for specific features of a particular topic. For example, if students are exploring the writing conventions of a particular author, they might be prompted for examples related to figurative language, personification, and analogies. Students would then explore multiple works from the author to build out this web. The web can be completed paper/pencil or through the use of a digital concept mapping tool like Mindmeister. You can provide more or less structure to the web (or the resources students would explore) based on the amount of time you have, the degree to which you want students to develop similar conceptions, or the experience students already have relative to the material.

Annotated Resource Collection
One strategy I frequently use in my teaching is to have students develop an annotated resource collection on a given topic. In this approach, students not only have to explore the topic, they also have to curate an annotated collection of materials to share with others. In an educational technology course I teach, I like to have students explore Web-based multimedia resources in their curriculum area (e.g., math, history) that they might use in their teaching. This Multimedia Collection project then serves as an efficient and effective way for students to explore the topic and create a resource for others at the same time.

Connections to 21st Century Skills and Technologies
Exploring a topic is a way to construct knowledge of a topic - an important dimension of 21st century learning design (21CLD). The degree to which they have autonomy and choice in selecting either the focus, process, or output of the exploration also may help them to develop key self-regulation skills from the 21CLD framework.

Accessing different types of resources online opens up a broad range of possibilities and representations of the content. You can also use different technology tools to share collections of resources (or encourage students to share their own collections). This can be accomplished through your learning management system, but wikis can also be very useful for sharing resources with your students. You can watch a short demonstration of how you can use Wikispaces for collaborative work here. Other “curation” sites like Pinterest and Blendspace are also great for sharing resources as well.

What strategies have you used to encourage students to explore topics in your classes?
Please post your comments below.

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“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”
- Douglas Adams

To help students build their background knowledge of a course topic, we most often rely on readings, lectures and presentations, and other “curated” experiences. Challenging students to interview others, however, is an under-utilized learning experience that lends authenticity and relevance to coursework. While interviews are often a key data generation strategy for qualitative or mixed methods research studies, they can also be useful as class assignments or projects as well.

Key features of the strategy
Interview activities work well with content that can be enhanced or extended through conversations with others outside the classroom. Whether they be experts or simply a “man on the street,” eliciting information, opinions and ideas with others can be a powerful learning tool for students.

For interview assignments to be helpful for students, we need to prepare them to conduct effective interviews. Students need guidance on how to select possible subjects, approach them, and, if necessary, ask for their consent. They need to determine a focus of the interview and prepare a set of questions to guide the meeting along with possible follow-up or probing questions. Students need to understand that effective interviews build from familiar or more surface level information to more complex, personal, or controversial topics. One helpful strategy to prepare students for effective interviews is to have them view and critique example interviews available online. They can often learn a great deal by seeing how more experienced interviewers approach the task.

The course content and the interests of the students will largely determine the focus of the interviews and possible subjects. It’s difficult, therefore, to provide a template for the ideal interview assignment or project. The following examples, however, may provide you with some ideas.

Examples and Variations
Different Approaches to Interviews
The Media Commons at Penn State University offers helpful guidance on interviewing as a learning experience. This resource offers suggestions on how to prepare for an interview, different techniques for capturing interview footage and a step-by-step process to prepare for, set up and conduct an interview for a variety of purposes. This resource is a helpful support for students conducting almost any form of interview for a class project.

Oral Histories
Interviews with subjects who have lived through a specific historical event are wonderful learning experiences for students in the social sciences. Through an oral history interview, students can delve deeper into a lived experience of history and begin to understand how perspective and point of view influences one’s view of the past. In his course “Crossing Over: Latino Migrant Roots and Transitions.” Dartmouth Professor Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera challenged her students to develop rich, written oral histories of Latino immigrants to the United States. The project, The Dartmouth Latino Oral History Project, offers detailed information on the structure and assessment of the project as well as students’ work from three sections of the course.

“Man on the Street” Interviews
When students are studying a social phenomenon, the impact of political or economic policy, or reactions to a current event topic, interviewing random citizens can provide an interesting learning experience. In sociology, business, government, and education courses, students can benefit from collecting data about a course topic through a short, highly structured interview of random passersby. Students can then pool the data they have collected for further analysis. In an American Government course, for example, students can conduct exit polls of voters as they leave the polling place on a particular issue. The same kind of interview could be conducted outside a screening of a controversial movie or at a political rally. These kinds of experiences can provide students an opportunity to grapple with multiple perspectives around complex issues.

Connections to 21st Century Skills and Technologies
As students conduct interviews, they can develop their ability to construct knowledge, an important dimension of 21st century learning design. Through interviews, they go beyond curated and edited sources like textbooks and have to grapple with the complexity of lived experience. They often must translate and/or apply what they’ve learned from the text or course lectures to different contexts – a key skill in the knowledge construction domain.

Digital cameras, audio and video recorders are helpful tools for interview experiences. Through the built in apps on their mobile phones or higher quality stand-alone devices, students can capture high quality material that they can then either transcribe or utilize in their course projects. The simplicity of both desktop (e.g., Windows Live MovieMaker or Apple’s iMovie) and Web-based video editing tools (e.g., WeVideo), allows students to easily edit, export, and post content from their interviews. This rich media content can add depth and authenticity to student work that can enhance written text.

What strategies have you used to encourage students to explore topics in your classes?
Please post your comments below.

As students work together on an assignment or project, it can be difficult to provide them with the tools they need in order to share ideas, add content, and revise/comment on each other's work. Add to that the challenge of assessing individual student's contributions to the group effort and you have a couple of significant challenges to confront. In many different projects I've found a wiki to be an indispensable tool that helps to address both of these challenges.

What is a wiki?
When you hear the word "wiki" you might immediately think of Wikipedia, the "free encyclopedia" that anyone can edit. While this is the most commonly known wiki, this is just one example. Educause describes a wiki as "a Web page that can be viewed and modified by any- body with a Web browser and access to the Internet." A wiki Web page or site allows for easy editing and revising with a single or multiple contributors. Inherently flexible, wikis are very easy to learn quickly and get started with right away. 
 
The creator can set different levels of permission ranging from public (anyone can view the content and anyone can edit) to protected (anyone can view the content, but only members can edit) to private (an account and password is required to view or edit the content). Please see the video below for an introduction to setting up and working with wikis using my favorite wiki service, Wikispaces.

How can wikis support collaborative work?
Since multiple authors can contribute to a single wiki site, it's an ideal tool to support collaborative work. While the same is true for collaborative word processors like Google Docs or Word Online, a wiki can be organized with multiple pages and can include any type of digital media, including embedded videos and other Web services. Contributors can add to, edit, or provide comments on the content from anywhere using any modern Web browser - there's no software to install. 

From the instructor's point of view, wikis have one key advantage over many other collaborative tools - the ability to track who has contributed what to the site. For any page on a wiki site, you can view a history of the changes. Each time someone logs in to edit the content, you can click on that version of the page to see exactly what they added or deleted from that page. In this way, the quantity and quality of individual contributions can be clearly viewed and tracked.

How can I get started using wikis in my teaching?
In the following video, I walk you through creating your first wiki and highlight the key features of a wiki that you might find useful to support collaborative work.

What questions do you have about wikis and how might you leverage them in your teaching?
Please add your comments below.

As the semester winds down, we shift our focus from class preparation to assessing student work. Beyond just assigning a grade, assessment provides us with an opportunity to offer feedback to our students, helping them to grow and develop in their discipline. It can be extremely time consuming, however, to provide substantive feedback to our students.

Ten years ago, I would print student papers and projects, mark them up with a pen, fill out a rubric and return both during the next class or leave them outside my office door to pick up. Five years ago, I would have my students email me digital copies of their work. I would then use the Commenting features in Microsoft Word to provide feedback, fill out a separate rubric and then return them. These days, I take advantage of the assignment submission, rubric, and inline commenting features all within our BlackBoard learning management system (LMS). While grading is still one of the least favorite parts of my job, these tools make the process much more efficient and enable me to provide substantive feedback to my students.

Rubric based assessment for efficiency
I’m so glad I’ve moved on from asking my students to submit their work to me via email. My inbox piles up quickly enough without 30-40 emails from students with their work attached. Within BlackBoard (and probably most other LMS platforms), I can create assignments that provide students the opportunity to upload their work directly to me within the LMS. I can set the parameters for when the submission window is open. The system then marks an assignment late if it’s turned after the specified deadline. Once submitted, I can begin to comment on the work.

When I set up an assignment for students to submit a paper or project, I can also create a corresponding grading rubric to assist me in assessing the work. For example, in my educational technology courses I ask students to create a technology-infused lesson plan. Here’s what the rubric looks like in BlackBoard:

Once completed, the scores that you enter on the rubric are automatically added to the Grade Center. Students are then able to view the rubric and comments along with their grade. I must say, this works extraordinarily well. The Inline Grading feature, however, takes it to another level.

Inline commenting for substantive feedback
For me, using a rubric right alongside the student work is useful. The addition of the inline grading tool enables you to also embed comments directly in the student’s paper. You can add comments, draw on the document, highlight and cross through text.

These markups are then saved with the document and can be viewed by the student. Being able to anchor my comments to specific parts of their document helps me to be more specific and targeted than would be possible (or at least practical) than just adding comments in a single text box for the assignment.

Grading student work is certainly not my favorite aspect of teaching. I must say, however, that the simplicity and flexibility of the rubric and inline grading features of BlackBoard make the process both more efficient and more effective.  Now, back to grading...

What strategies do you use (with or without technology) to provide students with efficient, but substantive feedback?
Please post your comments below.

Certain things sound like great ideas: key lime pie, 70 degrees and sunny, a fresh pot of coffee, a co-constructed collaborative course. This semester, I’ve just begun an effort to work with a group of advanced Masters and Doctoral students to co-construct a course that focuses on the use of digital tools to support 21st century skills in K-12 and university classes. Great idea – much more challenging than I thought in practice.

“The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.”
- John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

The Plan
When I realized that I would be teaching a doctoral level class on digital tools for learning with fourteen experienced, engaged professional educators, I wanted to design a course experience that would both honor their expertise and serve as a group to develop a substantive, useful resource. I decided that over the course of five weeks we could devise, plan, and begin to build out a Web-based resource for teachers that would highlight particular digital tools to support different 21st century learning experiences (e.g., collaboration, communication). In this case, I’d planned to use a wiki site (Wikispaces) to allow for multiple authors to easily contribute content on the site.

We began by brainstorming characteristics of the digital tools we would review that would be helpful for other educators. We created a template that included the name and link to the tool, a basic overview of the features, possible educational advantages of the tool, and possible educational constraints or challenges with the tool.  We then planned to use the remaining two hours of class time to begin reviewing a set of tools that would facilitate collaboration in the classroom. Over the remaining weeks we would develop a rich resource that would serve as a form of educational leadership. Such was the plan…

The Reality
We reached quick consensus on the kinds of information we would include in our reviews and agreed to take another look at the categories at the end of class to see how well they worked. The students then began to examine some of the links and resources I’d provided. Within a few minutes, the students had identified the particular tools they wanted to review. The first challenge surfaced when the students needed to log in to the wiki to create a page for their tool review. Despite discussion and demonstration, this proved more difficult than I’d expected. One Web browser seemed to create difficulties, causing one student to lose her work to that point. After another 20 minutes or so, students had ironed out these issues and began to review the tools they selected to review.

Then, a new challenge arose. Some were able to jump right in and get a sense for the tool and begin their reviews. Others wanted to fully understand all the nuances of the tools. Some had selected very complex tools, while others selected tools they were already familiar with. This led to some students finishing quite quickly, others making slower progress, and some feeling completely overwhelmed to do the work in class. I hadn’t anticipated this wide variation of approach. Others had selected tools that weren’t really a good fit for educational settings, thereby wasting time that they invested in getting to know the tool. Consequently, we hadn’t made nearly the progress I’d hoped…at least so far.

Picking up the Pieces
So, how do you navigate these kinds of inevitable challenges that emerge in a collaborative, co-constructed learning experience? I don’t pretend to have all the answers (or even some good ones), but here’s how I approached the situation.

1.  Read the room and adjust
   Early on, I could see the frustration – first with the wiki tool, and then with the time crunch of reviewing the tool in the allotted time. I could see I needed to release the pressure valve. So, I helped get the students on track with the tools as quickly as I could and then steered some of the students away from particularly complex tools that would be difficult to review quickly. 
2. Be honest
   Rather than try to minimize the challenges the students were experiencing, I decided to be open and honest with them that this experience wasn’t going as smoothly as I’d anticipated. This opened up a dialogue wherein the students were able to both voice their concerns, but also suggest solutions.
3. Make a decision and move forward
   At a point, even with the helpful suggestions, I knew it was key for me to decide how we would move forward. I adjusted the expectations, gave the students more time, and agreed to screen the tools in advance and provide a think-aloud demonstration of reviewing tools at the beginning of next class.

By the end of class, I think students left thinking that we will be able to move forward productively at the next class session. I hope they’re right.

Will this experience discourage me from structuring this kind of learning experience in the future? No. Will it encourage me to think through the process more clearly, try to anticipate challenges, and create a back-up plan in advance? Yep. Keep your fingers crossed for me next week.

How have you addressed these kinds of challenges in your courses?
Please post your comments below.