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Study and Work
Off-Campus l
Students Teaching the Public l Home
Page: Beyond Computer Literacy
The fourth of five outcomes of a liberal
education as described by the Association of American
Colleges and Universities:
4) A proactive
sense of responsibility for individual, civic, and social
choices—achieved and demonstrated through forms of learning
that connect knowledge, skills, values, and public action,
and through reflection on students’ own roles and
responsibilities in social and civic contexts;
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Technology makes it more
feasible for students to
study and work
off-campus on service learning projects, while
maintaining contacts and work on-campus. The same is
true for faculty who may travel with the students to
mentor them.
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I first heard about
this potential for technology when Education
programs began expanding and enriching the ways in
which they supported student teachers. Those early
initiatives used e-mail to enrich and extend contact
between student teachers and the faculty back on
campus.
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Judi Moreillon of Northern Arizona
provides an example of how writing on the web can be
used to further enrich and support education
students. For years, she and cohorts of students
have been developing a
web site about Southwest Children's literature.
Education majors review books, create lesson plans,
and work with children in the schools; the
children's works about the books appear on the web
site, too. Moreillon has turned necessity into
advantage: because her students can't put their work
on the web themselves, she works with each of them
in turn to upload the web materials; she says this
has been a rich way to help socialize her students
into the community of teachers - in those moments,
she and her students are collaborators. And the web
site provides a service for educators around the
world, especially school teachers in the Southwest.
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One of the more
dramatic instances of this kind of
technology-enhanced service learning is the
program of international learning at the Worcester
Polytechnic Institute. All WPI students do a
team project that applies learning in their majors
to social problems and about half now do this work
abroad. The level of work abroad exploded in the
late 1990s as technology made it easier for
faculty-student teams to leave the country for two
months at a time.
Here's an
evaluation of their program and here's a
more detailed
description of work that WPI students have been
doing in Venice over the past few years.
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(NEW!)
Ruth
Kastenmayer is teaching a service learning
course at Judson College in Summer 2006 in which
students will create web sites for community
agencies. For more on this project as an example of
digital writing (i.e., part of Outcome #1),
click here.
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Do you have other examples where
technology is being used in ways that enrich and
extend service learning?
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Can you point me to other kinds of
examples where technology alters our goals or our
educational strategies in this area?
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Students creating
web sites to teach the public - the best way to
learn is to teach. The web opens up vast new realms of
learners for students to teach. This kind of project can
seem far more real and motivating than writing a paper
that only a professor will read, and will read only
once.
In what ways do the
uses of information technology in the wider world have
implications for what all students in higher education
should learn? If you know of
examples that can be used to expand this web page, please
let me know!
- Stephen C. Ehrmann,
ehrmann@tltgroup.org
Study and Work
Off-Campus l
Students Teaching the Public l Home
Page: Beyond Computer Literacy
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PO Box
5643,
Takoma Park, Maryland 20913
Phone:
301.270.8312/Fax: 301.270.8110
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To talk about our work
or our organization
contact: Sally Gilbert |
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