Using Web Technology to Teach Students about Their Digital World

Authors

Lynn M. Braender, The College of New Jersey
Craig M. Kapp, The College of New Jersey
Jeddel Years, The College of New Jersey

Abstract

In the School of Business at The College of New Jersey, students are required to take two courses in Management Information Technology (MIT). All students enroll in the same first course. This course focuses on Emerging Technologies and intermediate level data analysis skills. Students are then free to choose their second course. Each MIT course requires that we spend time discussing the social, ethical, and legal issues surrounding technology. This is often a difficult lecture because students think that we are preaching rather than educating them. We also face an expanding curriculum due to the explosion in technology but our core curriculum remains limited to these two classes. To help us overcome our challenges, we turned to Web 2.0 technology to create an interactive learning platform where faculty and students could write and comment about emerging social issues surrounding the Web. In the learning environment that we created, students were provided the opportunity to work with many Web 2.0 tools to learn, interact with fellow students, and express their opinions and ideas. Our team employed the open source content management system Wordpress to build, manage, and monitor this site. In addition, we used Google Analytics to gather usage information. This paper will discuss the process we took to build and use the site and some of the lessons we learned along the way.

Recommended Citation

Braender, Lynn M.; Kapp, Craig M.; and Years, Jeddel (2009) "Using Web Technology to Teach Students about Their Digital World," Journal of Information Systems Education: Vol. 20 : Iss. 2 , 145-154.
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jise/vol20/iss2/4