I was reading an article about blogging in a month-old edition of the Chronicle (4/4/08), and ran across an idea that might come in handy in many of your classrooms. The article, “Public Intellectuals in the New-Media Landscape” is an adaptation of a keynote address given by Henry Jenkins at the Chronicle’s Technology Forum and primarily discusses the use of blogs at MIT’s comparative-media-studies program.
However, he mentions something in the article that he calls “paired conversations,” which use Google Docs to hold an asynchronous dialogue between two academics on opposite sides of an issue, as well as on opposite sides of the globe.
This strikes me as an excellent (and absolutely free) way to bring outside voices into your classroom, as well as to create collaborative activities within your classroom community.
For more information on Google Docs, visit http://docs.google.com/.