More than 20 University of Wisconsin Oshkosh students participated in a two-month teaching and advising project with students from Australia, India, New Zealand, Pakistan, Qatar and the United States — all without leaving the classroom.
The Net Generation Education Project, a global interactive research project, focuses on how new technology is being integrated into learning styles of the new generation of high school students.
“This project is about collaborating beyond the classroom,” said Eric Brunsell, UW Oshkosh assistant professor and expert adviser for the project. “It shows that emerging technology can be used to do things in education that haven’t been possible in the past.”
The project was based in part on the book “Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World” by Don Tapscott’s and the New Media Consortium’s 2009 Horizon Report.
Approximately 300 participating high school students were placed on 50 teams that researched one Net Generation “norm” and one emerging technology and then created more than 150 videos.
Each UW Oshkosh student in Brunsell’s instructional technology class acted as expert advisers for two teams of high school students from around the world, guiding their research.
“It was really cool to see that these students can create these videos,” said Sara Pelech, an elementary education major. “They were collaborating in a way that I had never seen before. It was really rewarding to see the students’ progress and encourage them along the way.”
The most popular trends students came up with include the freedom of choice when choosing how they are informed by the Internet, collaboration in working with other students and experts from around the world, and more specialized access to online information.
UW Oshkosh students and other experts around the world judged the videos based on design and technical quality, construction of ideas and creativeness.
“This really helps students broaden their perspective on issues that face the global world,” Brunsell said. “It really gives our students a sense about what is technologically possible in education.”
Flat Classroom, a grassroots group of educators who focus on collaborative technology projects in their classrooms, helped organized the project, along with ReactionGrid’s software, which allows interaction in a 3-D, virtual world.
Brunsell said that while new Web 2.0 tools are changing rapidly, the technological trend is that people are no longer just consumers of information.
“People don’t have to have a huge toolset to create and share their knowledge on the Web,” Brunsell said.
For more information, visit the NetGen Ed Project Wiki at http://netgened.wikispaces.com.
To view NetGen Ed Challenge Winning Videos visit, www.grownupdigital.com/index.php/2009/04/net-gen-education-challenge-winners.