Rubber Ring
I am hearing the song “Rubber Ring” by the Smiths.
I read a conference proceeding article by Frederick Jenny about Instructional Technology in Computer Scienc e Education. In the article, Jenny gives an overview of the online tools that he has used in his own computer science classes.
The proceedings are from 2004, and the technology that is discussed is a bit “old”, but the concepts introduced can easily be used in the Web 2.0 arena. Jenny’s article focuses on using the Blackboard system. I will try to translate this into Moodle since this is the LMS that our school is using at the moment. I have picked out the most “relevant” ideas (from my perspective) to discuss in this review.
Students in his class have a personal “Inbox” where they turn in assignments. This is a directory where they can read, write and execute files. Jenny sets this up manually for each student. Students do not have access to other students’ directories in this scenario. I like this, and I really wish that Moodle would provide this sort of thing. You can set up individual assignments, journal entries, etc, but it doesn’t seem like you can set up a general area where students can store their own files for a course in Moodle.
This sort of centralized storage could easily be resolved by having the students start a blog for the course. But, the blog would not be part of the LMS, and it would not be part of the online grading system that is built into Moodle. It seems like this is a feature that needs more investigating for the Moodle developers. I am using a slightly older versionn(1.7x), though. Perhaps they have added this functionality in newer versions. I will have to investigate this.
Additionally, Jenny had his students work together on papers in a wiki-like way. They wrote papers using Frontpage and HTML and uploaded them for viewing and sharing. Naturally, this type of group essay development could be done via a wiki. Moodle does have a wiki feature built in, but I am not a fan of it. From what I have read, the next version of Moodle has a better wiki engine. I will check this out.
One thing that Jenny touches on that I think would be extremely important, especially for a programme dossier for IB Computer Science, is the storage of “before” and “after” work. Since it is easy to use digital means to create and store work, it is easy and extremely important to keep before and after examples of work that a student is doing. A blog or wiki could easily facilitate this. If students use their space to document the progression of their project, then that actually solves some issues for the teacher:
- it removes any suggestion that the student has plagiarized work,
- it demonstrates engagement on the part of the student (which counts towards one of the criteria),
- and it shows how the stages progressed via time stamp which ensures that information gathering is followed by design, design is followed by program build and the build is followed by testing.
For the student, it helps with the following:
- keeping everything in one place,
- showing progression and growth over time which can be used as demonstration of scholarly work for university applications,
- and giving the programme dossier an online, public presence which would make it seem more relevant to the outside world (especially if students got feedback from external sources).
The technology that Jenny presented has generally been superseded with time, but the simple before and after suggestion has sparked a slightly different way of thinking about how to use the tools for the students’ programme dossiers. From this I have two tasks:
- First Choice: Evaluate whether or not the blog feature in Moodle (or assignment feature) has evolved to support an ongoing project throughout the course of a semester such that a student can track progress over time.
- Second Choice: Evaluate whether or not there are blog providers out there that would support the same type of thing.
Jenny, Frederick (2004). Instructional Technology in Computer Science Education. Proceedings of the 2004 ASCUE Conference, June 6-10, (pp. 147-150). Surfside Beach: Association of Small Computer Users in Education.
