On Tuesday, April 24, at 14:15, Barbara Ganley is giving a guest lecture here at the University of Bergen. Barbara is the author of bgblogging, and has used blogs in her teaching of writing for several years with great success. She has given numerous talks on blogging and education as well as on other topics (“The World is Flat: Using Social Software to Create Global Sustainability”, for instance, is among the listed talks on her sidebar), and browsing through her slides for talks, which she conveniently keeps at Flickr, it looks as though a talk by her is a beautiful visual experience as well as deeply interesting in terms of her ideas.

As you can see from the image pasted to the left here, I’ve tried a new kind of outreach in publicising Barbara’s visit this time: I made a Facebook Flyer. I tried to follow Trendcatching’s advice on how to make a flyer that works – I mean, clearly it’s oversimplifies things a bit (and speaks against itself by asking students to come to a lecture that’s not about listening but mutual apprenticeships, ah well), but with such a limited wordcount you’ve got to. Have any of you tried using Facebook for this sort of thing? I’d like to use it for flyers to advertise our whole program – a lot of students simply haven’t heard of Humanistic Informatics, so getting our name out there would be great.

I’m really looking forward to meeting Barbara. It was Toril Salen, who just recently finished her MA on blogging and learning, who “introduced me” to Barbara in the blogosphere, and I was thrilled to hear that she was going to be in Scandinavia and happy to come to Bergen. If you’re in town, please come and join us!

Here’s the description of the talk:

Web 2.0 in the Undergraduate Classroom: Creativity, Collaboration and Communication

Barbara Ganley
Middlebury College, USA

Tirsdag 24. april kl 14:15
Sydneshaugen skole: Auditorium N

Blogging, wiki-creation, podcasting, video-sharing and other Web 2.0 practices are making their way into even traditional undergraduate classrooms, often as a quick, convenient new way to do the same old things: the instructor disseminates information to students and students present their learning back to the teacher. But what happens when blogs and other social software are integrated into the core of a course as a means for teachers and learners, together, in what cybertheorist Pierre Levy calls reciprocal apprenticeships, to explore creative thinking, collaboration and communication in their discipline across media and audiences? What happens to traditional classroom dynamics? To a teacherís understanding of what she ought to be teaching and how? In this talk, Barbara Ganley, a Lecturer in the Writing Program and English Department at Middlebury College in Vermont, USA, will share six years of teaching with blogs, looking closely at repercussions on teacher and learner within an active learning community, on learning outcomes and on assessment.

Barbara Ganley is a Lecturer in the Writing Program and English at Middlebury College, and an active implementer of new media and social software into literature and writing classrooms. Her special interests include digital storytelling as a means of academic discourse and integrated web technologies as a vehicle for expression, community-building, and student-centered learning.