Taking the class online

In my environmental advocacy class at the De La Salle - College of Saint Benilde, I use asynchronous collaboration. I announce my exercises and homework on my environmental blog and have them submit their work on a dropbox shared folder. I was thinking of increasing my students experience of Web 2.0. For example, I was thinking of having essay exercises done as blog entries instead of word documents uploaded into dropbox. I'm also mulling about putting my quizzes online.

Why am I doing this? For documents, it's all about sustainability. My folks today already have their blogs so another entry wouldn't hurt considering the format is optimized for the web. A word document on the other hand would likely require more storage considering that I would have to consolidate them in one storage location.

As far as quizzes are concerned, if the question database is correctly designed, these can be made more challenging than paper quizzes. I have done online courses with challenging question sets. I've taken computer based toefl. There is a lot of potential in other things like, aptitude tests, lsat prep, etc. Putting tests online also builds on this generation's affinity with computer games.

The ecological problems of this world, have been associated with technology. However, I do believe the solution also lies with technology. The revolutions of the industrial age drove us to pillage our planet of resources. The revolutions of the information age have the potential of reversing the damage.