The Project We were assigned a project to research technology here at Suffolk University The question was open ended and we could choose the subject matter that we studied.

Our Purpose To find out how students feel about Blackboard, blogs, and wikis. Investigate how prepared students felt to use Blackboard, blogs, and wikis. Asks students how blackboard, blogs, and wikis could be improved. To find out we polled students with a survey

What is Blackboard? Blackboard Inc. is a global leader in enterprise technology and innovative solutions that improve the experience of millions of students and learners around the world every day. Blackboard allows corporate, and government organizations to extend teaching and learning online

What is a ? “ The abbreviated version of “weblog” The term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. Topics range from; Personal to political One narrow subject to a whole range of subjects Blogs can be used as; Personal online diary News post Commentary

Blogs cont. Suffolk University started to promote using blogs as a pilot 2 years ago Website Suffolk ” Backed up by Academic Technology Currently about courses use blogs Information portal Optional syllabus Course materials Posting course related assignments

What is a Wiki? A “wiki” is to an open, collaborative community website. Wikis can be used for personal note-taking to collaborating online, assembling an online community, and managing a traditional website. In the classroom a teacher can post something, and ask students their thoughts. Each student can elaborate on the previous student’s post, as well as adding their own ideas.

Methods We handed out 20 surveys for each technology to classmates in various classes We collected the surveys distributed and tallied the results The respondents for each survey were from a different classes, but we did poll our SCI183 class for both blogs and blackboard The WIKI survey was only handed out to one class, MKT210 We put the technologies into comprehensive graphs so we could compare them We also posted these graphs on our website which can be found here:

Which classes do you use blackboard for? N=20

Blogs Survey Results N=20

Comments Discussion More interactive use Post with other media Movies Podcasts Links

WIKIS N=18

Conclusions-BlackBoard Blackboard is mostly used for homework, syllabus, and grades. The whole communication aspect of blackboard is not being utilized. Most students made the suggestion that it should take less clicks to get there. Many student also commented that even professors who do not use blackboard should at least be required to upload the syllabus Students also suggested that blackboard should be integrated into MySuffolk

Conclusion-Blogs Students need to learn how to use blogs Use options, tools, functions efficiently Our group’s suggestions Suffolk should be integrated into MySuffolk Mix with other multimedia RSS Feedback Microblogging services

Conclusion-Wikis We found that most students we polled weren’t sure whether they would like to use wikis again. This lead us to conclude that students are unsure how useful wikis are to their learning, but that could be due largely to the fact that the class we polled were using wikis for the first time.

Amy Campbell is a junior at Suffolk University and is an applied legal studies major. Alicia Palleschi is a junior at Suffolk University and is studing sociology and Spanish. Ian Woods is a senior at Suffolk University and is a film studies major. Mayumi Togawa is an exchange student from Japan and is currently a sophomore at Suffolk University and is majoring in international relations.