Abstract:

In the United States, a university professor commonly interacts and relates to students in two main ways. Firstly he transmits his knowledge and that of other experts on the subject at hand, and secondly he administers the process of evaluation, assessment, and "credit" granting that is then made part of the student's permanent record. The latter is typically seen by students as the more important of the two. "Grades" are frequently understood as the way in which students are "paid" for their work. Though perhaps understandable, the obsession with scores and grades often hinders the work of the First Way: the learning and absorption of knowledge. What is needed is a third way of relating and interacting to reinforce the "real work" of a teacher-student relationship. This way would not duplicate the functions of the first, and it should have as little to do with the second as possible. Instead, the Third Way should focus on the meta-intellectual capacities and skills needed for both the work at hand and for all knowledge and intellectual activity. It should give students a more transparent window into the "life of the mind" and in particular the life of the professor's mind. Students should not only see the professor teaching, but they should see him thinking as well, and in a way not limited strictly to the content of the university course.

Of necessity, the content of this Third Way must be presented outside the formal environment of the university and its instructional apparatus, tainted as both are in the mind of many students with the intractable affects of institutional authority. Direct face-to-face interaction of this kind would naturally be preferable but just as naturally impractical under most (certainly American) circumstances. Simply put, there are too many students and too little otherwise uncommitted time. Here then is where Web 2.0 applications may be useful. University teachers have long acknowledged the value of hypertext and the Web in packaging and delivering content to students. Less clear, though, has been the usefulness of applications such as web logs ("blogs") and social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, even though both private enterprise and governments are making fruitful use of these Web 2.0 innovations. The core of this paper is a "dispatch from the front lines" on how the author has experimented with these innovations over the past year in an attempt to pursue the Third Way, and what value they hold for future use in the small regional university where he teaches History.

Keywords:

Web 2.0, meta-intellectual, blogs, social-networking sites.