Thanks Wayback

Today is the start of my Northeastern class EDU-6323 – Technology as a Medium for Learning.  It also provided an interesting lesson in edtech!

I spent several weeks in December setting up the course, which I have taught before…shifting some readings, condensing a week on video and adding a week on AR/VR, and re-recording my intro video.  So all was set when I left on holiday in New England for Christmas.

Given that, not happy when I opened my emails this morning and saw:

Hey Professor,

The link to the first reading (From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments) is broken.

-Jake

Yes, the very first reading assignment – Mike Wesch’s (2009). From knowledgable to knowledge-able: Learning in new media environments. Academic Commons7 – was now a dead link.

It looked like the domain itself had lapsed at the Academic Commons page, but there was a TEDxKC talk that Mike had done in 2010.  So I shifted the reading assignment to a video one.

Then I remembered the Wayback Machine, the digital archive of websites that has been around since 2001.  Sure enough, Mike’s article was captured in the past.

So now I again tweeked the assignment to use the video and add the article as background…which is actually a better assignment than what I started with.

Then, as I was drafting this post, I noticed that I may have missed a posting from Mike’s home website – Digital Ethnography – and one can find the article there.

So some scrambling this morning as the course starts…but also a lesson in edtech – links come and go…but thank goodness for the Wayback Machine!

Hope those of you teaching this term are off to a better start than this! 🙂

2 thoughts on “Thanks Wayback

  1. Great post to open a new semester, also a lesson: the Wayback Machine is great for when we want something to revive, but when we don’t…. Something worth discussing with students, maybe not pertinent to college-age but certainly for younger. What do you think? (Have a terrific semester!)

  2. Thanks, Patricia. It is also a lesson that nothing truly disappears off the web! The center I worked in from 2006 to 2014 no longer exists…but thanks to the Wayback Machine, one can still find our old website and resources.

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