Over the years, I have taught a number of different courses and one thing that has become very clear over the years is that teaching is one of the most involved and engaging activities around. This has been especially true as, since 1993, we have seen an explosion in computer technology - especially in the area of computer mediated communication (CMC).
I have been interested in CMC since 1985, well before the appearance of the World Wide Web. The deployment of the Web, however, has had a profound impact on all areas of our lives - including how we teach and how our students study.
I started integrating wepages into my courses in the mid-1990’s, one of the first people at Carleton to do so. Until 2004, each time I taught a course, I would build a web page to support that course. Over the years, how the course page was been designed changed but always with a specific rationale in mind.
In 2004, I teamed up with my old friend Jim Cassidy to work on the issue of elearning. Jim did some research and suggested that we try using Moodle, an open-source courseware package. We have been using it now for four years, and the reaction has been fantastic.
Personally, I find the increasing reliance by students on the web to be a problem. There are certain pschological limitations imposed by the digital era on people that are not, to my mind, conducive to good scholarship. The most obvious one is the perceptual invisibility of many works that are not online. On the other hand, one of the nice things about shifting to a Moodle environment, and away from “normal” web pages, has been a marked increase in general interactivity.
My current moodle site for my courses is available here.
