Mid August is time to get serious about preparation for the Fall semester. I realize that some educators are already back and hard at work, but this is for the rest of you.
I have spent the past month or so updating “Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web“. This is one of Cindy and my online textbooks for preservice and in-service educators. We have two textbooks one derived from our original textbook (now a Kindle book “hybrid”) and our experimental online book. We first used our online book to explore how our traditional book might be modified so that educators and students were not forced to rely on a hardcopy book within a field emphasizing other methods for learning. We did move beyond our traditional commercial textbook, but we have retained both products to continue our exploration of content options.
Our online book has gone through a number of iterations over the past ten years. It was first written as a wiki. We then recreated it as a set of web pages. Now, we have redone the book as pages within WordPress. Most use WordPress as a blogging platform, but the software is quite flexible and offers advantages as a content management system. The content of the book has been continually updated and the WordPress environment should make future updates easy.
Meaningful Learning and the Participatory Web is out effort to demonstrate the generative learning potential of technology. Using the long accepted value of “writing across the curriculum” or “writing to learn”, we redefined such as activities as “authoring to learn” and “teaching to learn” in keeping with the participatory theme and the enhanced capabilities of digital technology. The book uses the interrelated concepts of tool and tactics to propose classroom activities. For each category of application, we connect tutorials explaining technology use (tool) with classroom applications (tactics).
All of our online resources are available at no cost.
