Chas recently invited me to talk to faculty and graduate students during one of our Course in College Teaching (CCT) sessions.  I discussed a wide variety of technologies available to Penn State instructors from a wide variety of units (see the 1-page resource document). I spent a good portion of the time showing different pedagogy approaches using blogs, wikis, video and games for teaching and learning. 

Some interesting questions from the group (some I could not answer unfortunately):

– How does intellectual property work if I’m designing a course in the blog or wiki platform for online delivery?

– How do I know if my students are plagiarizing or using copyrighted material in video projects?

– How do I decide whether to use a blog or a wiki in my course?

I was able to tackle the final question, mostly because it’s a pedagogy question; it depends on what you’re trying to get across to your students or have them learn.  That will likely dictate which platform you use.  Both the blog and wiki platform overlap in my mind, in terms of the things you can do with them.  I’ve seen Science Education courses using the blog as the centerpiece of the course, and I’ve seen the exact same use in Psychology courses but using a wiki. 

I’m unsure about how IP works, and from my days in IST and elsewhere I get the feeling that is a case-by-case scenario, depending on how the instructor is being compensated for creating the course.  The question dealing with copyrighted material in videos…I can’t really think of a good way to decipher if your students are using copyrighted material or no.  Any suggestions?