workshop: Can You Digg It? at 2009 EDUCAUSE

The Can You Digg It?: Incorporating Google, Wikipedia, and YouTube into Multimedia Research Assignments that Susan and I facilitated at EDUCAUSE in November 2009 kicked off a series of Can You Digg It workshops we’re delivering during the Spring 2010 semester. 

Like many of my workshops at this point, this one did not develop out of a vacuum. Obviously it emerged from a variety of things; however, the two main precursors were the writing of The Wadsworth Guide to Research and the development of Creating Research Assignments that Foster Critical Thinking and Information Literacy workshop. I’m on a roll of using Google Sites for workshop materials for a variety of reasons: quick and easy collaborative wiki editing, no advertisements (I love Wetpaint Wikis , but the ads are not pretty), and an excuse to play in the wiki/ePortfolio application that my district has adopted.

At EDUCAUSE we presented a 3.5 hour workshop. Since it was a mixed audience (not just English faculty), we spent the first half of the workshop philosophically situating our overall project as well as providing a brief overview of the rhetorical situation (using Prezi). We spent the second half of the workshop discussing various technologies. Yeah...everyone there would have preferred more tech and less theory. We can’t help it...we think those philosophical assumptions are important! 

If I were to do this workshop again with a similar audience, I’d figure out a way to cut back the philosophy/theory portion and "get to the damn demo" (as CogDog likes to say). Maybe do a better job of using the "presentation" technologies to present and demo the technology at the same time? 

February 24 2010 | Posted in Workshops