Web-based Learning

Facilitator: Maria Ebner, Graduate Teaching Fellow

Session 2, 2:30-3:45  
    
Register for this session here!

Nowadays educators ask again: 

What is it like being a student today? And, how does the 21st Century affect learning? Or does it at all?  

My name is Maria Ebner, I am a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Center for Teaching, and I will be leading a session at gradSTEP in January 2009 which will focus on Web 2.0 technologies in classrooms, and their impact on teaching.

According to the YouTube video by Michael Welsch, a student today will read 2300 web pages, 1281 Facebook profiles this year, and 8 books. They will write 42 pages for class assignments this semester, and over 500 pages of email. Today’s undergraduates are “multi-taskers”, and they have to be, right?  Students of the 21st Century enter our classrooms with different experiences, expectations, and learning styles than previous generations of students.

How can we, as educators, hope to reach this increasingly diverse student body?  Many of today’s web technologies can be powerful tools for creating effective, collaborative web-based learning spaces.

And now I ask again:

What is it like to be a teacher today? How does web-based technology shape your classroom? Or should it at all?

Let me hear from you!