When Anthropology Lecturer Cathy Stanton proposed that students could "tweet" their first paper assignment, she wasn't talking about ornithology. Twitter.com, blogs and wikis are all forms of new media that no longer pertain solely to the realm of social networking — many of these formats, especially at Tufts, are now considered commonplace in an academic setting.
"Giving students the option to use whatever format or form of communication they wish — including the media that we use for the most off-the-cuff or personal kinds of communication — can be a useful way to take theories out of the realm of the esoteric and to reframe them as just ideas that we might toss around when we're thinking or arguing about a question that concerns or bothers us," Stanton said in an e-mail to the Daily. Stanton let the students in her Myth, Ritual, and Symbol class use any forum they wanted for their first assignment, be it a Skype session or Twitter feed.
Three years after implementing "Spark," a suite of web 2.0 tools used for collaborative and interactive work, Tufts University's Department of Information Technology has seen a steady rise in the number of new media forms utilized in the classroom. According to Director of Educational Technical Services Dr. Gina Siesing, Spark technology allows users to create and update blogs and wikis, as well as to create Web-based video annotation through a tool called "MediaMarkup." The wiki technology, however, has proven to be the most popular thus far.
"[The wikis] took off like wildfire pretty immediately, but with a steady growth curve over the past three years," Siesing said. "Interestingly, they're used in pretty even proportions by faculty, by students and by staff at the university. People use them for academic, administrative and co-curricular reasons."
Stanton uses the wiki format in lieu of a Blackboard site for her classes, a decision she made for two different reasons.
"I shifted into using wikis a couple of years ago because I'd gotten frustrated with the inflexibility of the Blackboard template, which has its uses but which isn't terribly adaptable," she said. "[Also], I was teaching an urban anthropology course, and it occurred to me that making a city is not unlike making a wiki, [in which] lots of people participate simultaneously in creating infrastructure and content, so I wanted to experiment with having a piece of course software that mirrored the subject matter of the course itself."
Another faculty member in the anthropology department, Assistant Professor Amahl Bishara, uses wikis as well, but integrates them into the course curriculum for her Human Rights in Cultural Contexts course.
"Instead of using Blackboard, we use a wiki — so all of our class discussions are on wiki, and then we have a section on the wiki for group projects. There are basically four students per topic, and each group has a page on the wiki," Bishara said.
In another one of her courses, entitled Media, the State, and the Senses, Bishara uses blogging capabilities through the Spark suite, which enables students to post and comment on each others' work. Bishara explained that blogging helps students to put anthropological thought into the contexts of their everyday lives.
"People can take anthropology and use the ideas that they're learning in class and apply it for them to think about their own lives," Bishara said. "And then the other thing, of course, is that many students haven't written blogs before, so it's also an experiment in new media."
Bishara went on to say that blogs should not necessarily supplant traditional academic assignments, but that they can add elements that more static formats cannot.
"Sometimes a research paper is absolutely the way to go," she said. "But sometimes you decide the topic early on in the term, and then you find some more interesting stuff later, and you don't really get to incorporate it into your research paper because you're already set on a topic. Whereas with a blog, you can use tools as they come along."
Stanton agreed, saying that digital formats like blogs and wikis tend to allow students greater accessibility to course materials and understanding.
"I also like to think about how to create different points of access when I'm teaching, since students find their way into a subject in many different ways; some are visual thinkers, some are more linear, some need experiential or tactile connections with what they're learning, etc.," Stanton said. "So to me, the various digital options are just good ways to create more ways to access course materials."
Although Spark technology offers the vastest amalgamation of academic technology tools, some teachers continue to use the options available to them on Blackboard.
Sophomore Sarah Ann Fung said her Classical Chinese Literature class doesn't use blogs but instead uses the Blackboard discussion board function in a similar manner. In her class, her teacher posts questions, to which students must upload one-to-two-page responses. Students are then required to comment on others' posts.
"I think [this format] is pretty useful, and you get to see other people's responses, even from years past, which is cool," Fung said.
Some professors, however, choose to utilize neither Blackboard nor Spark in creatng inventive uses of academic technology, instead opting to venture into more innovative forms of new media, like three-dimensional virtual environments. Siesling said that one faculty member, Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Justin Hollander, utilizes Second Life, a "virtual online world," in his teachings.
Siesling explained that such technologies help by "articulating an identity by both communicating in the virtual space as well as building spaces that represent yourself."
One student, senior Max Zarin, said that he used Second Life in one of his Ex-College classes, entitled The Social Web, as a means of online communication.
"We basically all brought our laptops in and went on Second Life as a class," Zarin said. "Other than exploring Second Life, there wasn't really another purpose; we didn't have a lecture in Second Life, it was just to familiarize ourselves with what it was like and [to] see the potential that it had in an educational setting."
