APPLYNG WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS TO ENGINEERING GRAPHICS TEACHING

摘要

During the last years, we have conducted a series of field studies about new technologies usage by our engineering students at the Universidad de La Laguna, and we have confirmed that an important percentage of them are regular users of Instant Messaging (IM) applications. Some of our students have problems to physically interact with other students, but when they come back to home, they rapidly connect with their friends in the chat rooms. These online-teenagers are our current and future pupils in the university. They are experts using discussion forums and chatting sessions. We launch the following question: Can we learn and incorporate to our classes, the previous experience of our students with these communication and information technologies? Web 2.0 concepts and technologies as weblogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds and other forms of manyto- many publishing are contributing to improve the interaction experience of users with Internet. Taking into account the previous analysis over the technological skill of freshman students in engineering, this paper provides an analysis of a series of Web 2.0 applications used to enhance the learning process in Engineering Graphics courses. A distinctive characteristic of these courses is that they are project-based and employ the e-learning platform Moodle as a complement to the face-toface classes.