It’s just you, your community, and the web, an environment where you are the centre and where your teachers – if there are any – are your peers. It is, I believe, the future – and where, one day, the next generation of Blackboards and WebCTs and Moodles and Sakais will make their mark
Derek interviews Oleg Liber who provides a fascinating insight and should be a definite read / listen (although I *strongly* disagree about the efficacy of a desktop based environment, but that’s another story).
The PLE is a unique interface into the owners digital environment. It integrates their personal and professional interests (including their formal and informal learning), connecting these via a series of syndicated and distributed feeds…
But what really got me tapping is this:
Although there is something quite compelling about the vision of a lifelong learning environment that is centered upon and perpetually belongs to the learner, I think we are some distance from being able to operationalize that vision.
As I’m not sure I agree. In fact, I reckon that right now we’re limited pretty much only by our imagination and ambition, and in tools like Elgg and WPMU we’re not far off cracking it. Yeh, major institutions aren’t going to start switching their LMSs to our PLEs any time soon and yes security, ip, maturity and (above all IMO) the structuralist transmissive models that LMSs on the whole play up to and re-enforce make this a difficult journey, but having said all that…. stranger things have happened.
I think that there are essentially only two key components that you need for the kind of online learning environment / tool (another good Liber point, are they really environments) and these are content/admin and communication. In the first instance (as you can see on the diagram) I reckon content/administration essentially comes down to course materials, assignments submission (this can be submitting a link too… just that it’s that ‘official’ step), personal enrolment details like address / contacts etc., calendar functionality for group organisation and a synchronous meeting environment for organised group or class get-togethers.
Not so exciting so far but do give me a moment….
This is of course the good stuff… three links essentially to a fully featured personal blog / Content Management System, a personal aggregator (which would, of course, simply opml export to your aggregator of choice) and some course aggregation features so that you could quickly browse latest postings in your course, details of teachers and students and other useful stuff like that :) Naturally all of these links would be database driven and pretty much entirely pre-populated with the exception of the capacity for teachers to prepopulate areas of personal aggregators either manually or automatically based on groups (there’s a group generator behind this as well… you just haven’t seen it yet ;)
Still not convinced? Well, OK then, assuming that the personal aggregator can be pretty much explained as Bloglines-esque (there are plenty of open source aggregators that could fit this mould) and that the course aggregation is simply a matter of automatically aggregating particular information (and posts of course) into various categories based on a few meta-tags (that will have been automatically inserted through enrolment details) then the real juicy bit is of course the blogging system whereby your learner actually ‘learns’ through the creation and development of posts, the linking, synthesising and pinging of other posts and by commenting on yet more posts on other blogs. So how do they do this? Well…
So, with this kind of blog the categories are automatically generated by the metadata of the students enrolment and they can then, nice and easily, post to that course (and / or the group which they are part of in that course). And if they want to view other postings in that group, or general information, or course material (if they’re authenticated… which they will be) then all they have to do is click on that course link and they’re there. Bingo.
Naturally they also are able to use this for posting about other stuff (they can just create another category or use their general one), creating assignments and all sorts of digital media, developing portfolios (now there’s a possible cool use of structured blogging!) and all that other stuff.
So for a teacher they simply prepare their course content, dates etc, and figure out what tasks / activities and deadlines they;re going to use (nothing more than a regular course really). They then facilitate by posting on their own blog (they can also mass email users / post news of the course aggregator… just to get the message home) and commenting on learners. Easy peasy.
For students they have their blog from day 1 and for each course they do they post to the relevant category and interact with other students and the teacher either through that or through linking. They’re able to refer to previous postings in future courses, demonstrate learning, develop some *serious* digital literacy and a fair bit more.
And of course, it incorporates subversion left right and frickin centre.
“But James, you’re dreaming, who’s gonna build this thing? Who’s got the time? The money?” I hear. Well, it could just be the schizoid paranoia but I’m taking a guess that it’s the wolves of blogland coming to trounce my amateurish and naive idea.
Not so I say. In fact I’ve been leading you down a bit of a garden path (sorry) in suggesting that there I’m talking about two separate environments here. Because in fact I’m not, I know one that only needs some tweaking and a bit of programming and you’ve got exactly what I describe above.
Check it out… WordPress as represented in WPMU has a very very powerful space called a ‘Dashboard’. This is where your content and administration sits, or, at the very least the links to the relevant courses content as uploaded in some simple system that your IT guys put together in 25 minutes. Assignments submission is simply a matter of a form and a drop-select (and add in some nice things like retrieve and edit and you’re really laughing), personal enrolment details can be represented and edited from here as easily as they can anywhere else. There’s no shortage of open source calendars if you’ve got a little time to fix ’em up and of course you can use and link in whatever synchronous environment you want. As for personal and course aggregators… the potential in tools like Gregarius and FeedWordPress is pretty huge too.
Well, according to the incredibly limited media coverage (more interested in the fear and loathing of what might happen) there were only 1500 people at the march yesterday. I beg to differ (the video clip below doesn’t seem to show up in Bloglines so you’ll have to visit this post to see it)…
Was a good way to spend a Friday afternoon, with a great bunch of people, here’s hoping there’s no trouble this weekend.
Google reader looks very cool but as long as I can’t import my xml subscriptions from bloglines… I ‘aint trying it and even then.. it doesn’t look like it matches/extends/simplifies the functionality in any way.
Sometimes I wonder why people don’t get it… just copy whatever Mark Fletcher (Yahoo Groups, Bloglines… could you think of more effective online communication apps???) does and you’ll be alright ;)
Duh: As Robpoints out I could just save the xml file as an opml file and upload it. Tum te tum.
Here’s a paper (for review) Anne Bartlett-Bragg & I are submitting to ASCILITE 2005. If you fancy December in Brisbane they’ve just extended the deadline to 22nd July!
Which means, I guess, we can improve on this… with your wonderful feedback :O)
Abstract
Since early 2001 several institutions and many individual teachers have incorporated blogging into their online pedagogical strategies. During this time, weblog (blog) publishing technologies have evolved towards accessibility and ease of use and the technological barriers preventing adoption have dissolved. Blogs and their associated technologies are arguably heralding the most significant technological development in online teaching and learning since the introduction of enterprise level Learning Management Systems (LMS).
This development is all the more significant as a result of the communication dynamics inherent within blog technologies. Whereas an LMS stores and presents all information on a centralised and hierarchical basis, bound within the subject and the organisation, blogs are distributed, aggregated, open and independent. Through the use of blogs, it is suggested that teachers and learners are becoming empowered, motivated, reflective and connected practitioners in new knowledge environments. The balance between individualised and centralised technologies is restored.
The application of weblogs in an education setting will, at best, have a limited impact if due consideration of these developing communication dynamics are ignored. This paper includes a brief review of some of the institutional and individual blog projects that are taking place in higher education. In doing so it examines the different types of blog environments that are being used in terms of their communication dynamics and subsequent impact upon teachers, learners and pedagogy. Further, a more detailed examination is made of the use of blogs in teaching and learning in courses at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In light of these studies and examination, possible approaches to implementing blogs in institutional settings are outlined in the form of an alternative Online Learning Environment. In addition, a study to be undertaken in 2006 examining the impact of blogs on teaching and learning at Deakin University will be described.
Introduction – blogs, RSS, email and bulletin boards
The precise details of the history of blogging are not entirely agreed upon, beyond that the medium as we are currently most familiar with began around 1996 and involved the regular posting of ‘items’ in reverse chronological order on a webpage (Blood 2000). It is this visual representation, incorporating other such features as links, comments, taglines, archives, permanent links, blogrolls and more which has largely dominated discussion about the nature of blogs and their potential use.
While these features are extremely significant aspects of what makes up a blog, arguably the most important developments in this area have had little to do with visual representation and form, and much more to do with the facility for the development of individual digital identity and an XML language known as RSS. Through blog technologies now available, individuals are able to simply represent themselves online and as an abbreviation of either ‘RDF Site Summary’ or ‘Really Simple Syndication’, RSS allows users to literally subscribe to a web page and receive complete or summarised new content. This can be done either through an application similar to an email inbox known as a news aggregator or a web based environment most commonly described as a ‘river of news’ aggregator (Winer 2005).
RSS has allowed for the introduction of an entirely new mode of communication and interaction with information artefacts. As, almost without exception in higher education, online asynchronous communication has taken place either through email or discussion boards (Farmer 2004), these aspects are best illustrated by comparison:
Through email, as illustrated in figure 1, control of the communication channel is held entirely by the instigator of the communication. As a result, group email discussion can be characterised at times by flame wars, antisocial behaviour and feelings of intrusion by the participants (Shirky 2004). Further, the information artefact is transitory, unfixed and not archived except in individual instances and as such is of limited value in communication that is meant to facilitate the development extensive consideration or, as Garrison and Anderson (2003) have put it, cognitive presence.
Bulletin boards, as illustrated in figure 2 and deliberately called by their original name rather than the more branded ‘discussion boards’, differ from email perhaps most obviously in that in most cases the user must visit an online area in order to access information. Equally significantly artefacts are now fixed, may be archived in a particular location and are able to be interacted with through threading and comments. As a result, while users are able to refer to, develop upon and interact with artefacts it must happen through deliberately visiting the bulletin area.
RSS, as illustrated in figure 3, differs from email and discussion boards in that users are able to select from where to receive communication and, in most cases, how much of that information that will eventually arrive (summaries, titles, or full entries). Publication of a users own material through RSS allows for the user to communicate only with those that are have selected to aggregate the RSS feed hence giving both parties control over the process. Further, as most RSS aggregators are either integrated with or stand alone desktop / web applications, no requirement is placed on the reader except to check the aggregator for new items.
As a result of these communicative attributes, blogs have been used in educational settings in a number of different roles which have both extended upon and in some instances replaced existing online communication tools. These have included use in an attempt to connect different faculties and communicate more effectively across a diverse university context (Wine, 2003), instead of bulletin boards (Wise 2005), as publication tools for critiques (Cooper & Boddington 2005), as the primary tool for online communication (Gibson 2004) and as independent learning and design journals or ePortfolios (MacColl et al. 2005).
While much has been made of the possible uses of blogs, little examination has taken place of the significant differences in communication dynamics between blogs and other forms on online communication and the impact of these factors on teaching and learning online. This paper seeks to illustrate to a degree that in order to effectively utilize blogs in an educational context, their inherent communication dynamics must be examined and pedagogical and environmental strategies and constructs used which reflect and utilize them effectively.
Different levels of success – some initial experiences with using blogs in education
Though almost all identifiable studies of the use of blogs in education have been relatively positive, there have been significant areas in which no particular difference or negative outcomes have been recorded. In particular, educators have struggled with participation, getting learners to extend themselves in the environment, conducting collaborative tasks using blogs and the challenges of renegotiating ‘private’ reflective tasks into the public arena.
For Krause (2004) the experience of using blogs in a graduate seminar called “Rhetoric and Culture of Cyberspace” made him wonder if:
“it is advisable or even possible to see blogs as a collaborative or especially “interactive” writing environments… I’ve come to believe we shouldn’t substitute blogs for other electronic writing tools that foster discussion and interactive writing, particularly email lists, commonly known as ‘listservs” (Krause 2004)
In this example Krause created three blog spaces for collaborative writing and is frank in his assessment of the lack of success of this experiment which he attributes to the nature of the blogging platform used, a lack of specific requirements expressed in terms of assessment and, most significantly, that participants were instructed to use only the blog platform for electronic communication. He continues to examine this, in particular by referring to “email as discussion space” and “blogs as publishing space” and develops on this further by calling blogs “individualistic” rather than “collaborative”.
Particularly interesting in this case is that when this project was underway the tool used (Blogger, http://blogger.com) did not provide any RSS feeds or categorisation and continues to only provide a competing format, Atom (Wikipedia 2005). Consequently, the blogs existed much more in the form of a bulletin board in their collaborative nature, users had to visit them regularly to communicate and consequently, as Krause quite correctly observes, email would have been a far more beneficial medium for discussion. Further to this, while Krause observes the “individualistic” nature of blogs, each of the three blogs spaces was in fact a shared environment. If one is to conceive of a blog as being ideally suited to the representation of an individual’s digital identity then to create a collaborative instance, as was the case in this instance, for the purposes of communication, is a problematic strategy.
In a similar experience to Krause, Cooper and Boddington (2005) found that their use of blogs, while certainly successful (the mean for their evaluation indicated participants felt quite positively about the experience – 4.53 on a seven point Likert type scale), demonstrated little differentiation between this mode and other forms of online communication.
Their use of group blogs was certainly in a similar fashion to that of Krause (including using the same popular ‘Blogger’ technology) where:
“students were allocated to a blog group (n = 7 to 10 for each group)… [they] were expected to choose one of the case studies provided and post a critique of it onto the group blog (worth 60% of their mark). They then had to post comments on the critique of two peers (worth 20% of their mark for each comment).” (Cooper and Boddington 2005)
While the resulting feedback indicated a degree of satisfaction and no objection to the use of blogs, there was little to indicate any significant shift in student perceptions and activity in the learning environments. While it is beyond the scope of this examination to argue hard and fast rules, this could be attributed, along with other factors such as the nature of assessment, to the use of blogs as collaborative areas without the use of aggregation.
This is a particularly persuasive perspective as studies in which aggregation and the individual use of blogs has been broadly used and focused upon have produced quite different results. For example, Gibson (2004) described his development of a ‘learning blogosphere’ in the University of Michigan’s School of Business as aiming to achieve a “view on what students were learning and where they were encountering problems in a relatively unstructured and technically challenging learning task”. This much more individually focused task notably used the far more flexible Typepad (http://typepad.com) platform and involved extensive aggregation:
“Students used Typepad for their individual blogs. We aggregated students blogs at an aggregation site. The aggregation site published a view of our blogosphere in both XHTML and various XML syndication formats including RSS, atom, and OPML.” (Gibson 2004)
This approach developed through the use of simply a list of sites to a publicly aggregated ‘river of news’ aggregator (Winer 2004) and then finally to the use of individual aggregators which Gibson refers to as “the solution I now recommend as a first option”.
Like Krause and Cooper & Boddington, Gibson also mandated posting and yet while minimal or barely satisfactory posting pattens and participation took place in the former studies, the 31 students in Gibson’s study contributed a stunning 845 posts, many of significant length (2004). Again, while this simply quantitative data is by no means satisfactory evidence of more credible learning it does point to a considerable level of involvement on the part of the participants and engagement with the subject matter and it can consequently be speculated that the significantly different models of individual versus group blogging and aggregation versus no aggregation may have had an impact upon this.
Similarly MacColl et al. (2005), while constrained to a degree on their use of aggregation (their learner blogs were placed behind an institutional firewall and they do not comment on the impact this had on aggregation), focused their blogs on individuals. They mandated posting for a number of different courses yet left significant room for manoeuvre within their assessment guidelines and conclude that “overall we view the introduction of blogs into our studio courses as successful”. This approach of ‘incorporating subversion’ (Farmer 2004) is also much in line with successful individualistic design of online learning environments.
Indeed, for MacColl et al. the individualisation of the blogging experience was significant in that it allowed for the students to express themselves through “heavily customising their blogs and requesting more advanced functionality”. This control over information is, they surmise, critical to “fostering appropriation of the technology for unintended uses” and plays heavily in their future plans to “explore extensions that approximate the fluency of a shared paper-based journal, as a basis for the serendipitous backtalk that reveals unanticipated problems or surprise opportunities”. Invariably, it would seem, aggregation and individualisation would play a key role in this.
Extending the experience – Blogging at UTS
A current research project being conducted within the Faculty of Education at UTS, is investigating the development of knowledge through the use of blogs leading to the formation of personalised collaborative learning networks. All research participants are students in undergraduate degrees studying e-Learning subjects and are required to maintain blogs throughout the entire subject and present their assessment tasks within the body of their blog. The aim of the research is to determine, from the students’ perspective, if the use of blogs to form personalised collaborative learning networks is perceived as enhancing their learning process and the development of knowledge.
The research includes testing a model developed from previous practice (Bartlett-Bragg 2003) and explore the learners’ experiences of identifying and joining a network of integrated communication that extends learning beyond the physical boundaries and opinions of the classroom. The development of knowledge through learning to self-publish and comment on postings that adhere to the protocols and norms of behaviour in the chosen communication network is expected to enhance the learners’ reflective, meta-cognitive and written skills as well as management of their learning. In the context of e-Learning subjects in particular, embedding the use of current technologies into the delivery and assessment of content is considered an essential component of the students’ studies.
The research project intends to foreground the learners’ experience and, using phenomenographic methodology, develop categories of description that are hoped to inform a framework for future application of collaborative learning networks using webpublishing technology. Related literature that will inform the proposed research project is drawn from an integration of multi-disciplinary fields. Theoretical perspectives that will be reviewed and incorporated in a new theoretical framework include:
Vygotsky’s (1978) educational theories that illuminate the development of knowledge construction through the discursive nature of weblogs and have been cited in current weblog research into knowledge management, learning and communication models. Wells (2000) further developed Vygotsky’s work and contributed to the assertion that all learning is socially constructed through language and is in some way collaborative, even when direct human contact is absent. Adapting this theoretical perspective, the new model will emphasise that the key to the collaborative component of learning is a process of inquiry within a social group and the construction of meaning through the exploration within the specific social context.
Bandura’s (1977) Social Learning Theory has the potential to provide an explanation for how weblog networks develop and the manner in which the participants learn the codes of behaviour and acceptable communication formats through observation and modelling.
Lave and Wenger’s (1990) Situated Learning theory will be integrated to conceptualise learning not as a separate and independent activity, but as an integral aspect of participation in a community of practice, thus providing a stronger theoretical rationale for educators to facilitate personalised collaborative learning networks for learners.
Boud (2001) and Schön (1987) provide models of reflective writing processes for learning journals and patterns of behaviours and issues that can be usefully incorporated in a theoretical framework to support writing for publicly published blogs in a collaborative network environment.
The research project is currently in the early stages of data collection and it is too early to report any significant findings. However, early results indicate that the learners’ experience has been challenging, yet positive, with students reporting enhanced levels of understanding of the subjects being studied through the process of publicly writing, researching and participating with others in networks across their blogs. The access to experts and other professionals beyond the boundaries of the classroom environment has been perceived as one of the most valuable aspects of the blog publishing activity. In addition, the ability to categorise and manage the learning content in a personalised manner is apparently an important aspect of the positive experience.
The negative aspects reported, include difficulty with learning new software formats, identifying and establishing networks, feelings of uncertainty in regard to writing publicly and motivation to post regularly.
LMSs & Blogging systems
As a result of and considering these multiple experiences the following blog-based online learning environment is proposed and contrasted with a traditional environment found in most higher educational contexts. At its core the environment highlights individualisation and aggregation and is centred on participants rather than the system or group (Farmer, 2005). It is argued that through this design of the online environment socially constructive and dialogic pedagogical approaches are more effectively put into practice and realised by participants.
In a traditional learning management system communication, content and participants are generally segmented into specific areas such as discussion boards, ‘learning modules’ and synchronous chat environments. Participants are able to communicate in specified areas through bulletin boards and interact with content as separate instances. In essence the participants are focused on the (bulletin-board) communication environments and the presented content.
However, in a blog based Online Learning Environment while content may be accessed from a particular location it is seen to be an integral part of each blogs production through links, commentary and more. Further, communication between participants is centred upon the each individual and facilitated through individual and group aggregation, comments on individual blogs and the use of hyperlinks by the participants.
Rather than segmented areas, courses become clusters of individuals. The capacity for participants to post to multiple categories through particular blogging tools allow then to actively belong to multiple communities and the use of comments, email, voip, instant messaging and other communication tools (frequently integrated into blog structure as alternative means of contact) allow for interaction extended beyond the discussion board area.
Deakin study – blogs across the university
In light of these observations and arguments a study is to take place in Semester 1 of 2006 in Deakin University to investigate the use of blogs as an emerging technology in online teaching and learning. The study will focus on the experiences of 10 teachers evenly split across the five faculties of Deakin implementing blogs in their teaching and learning. It is also hoped that the emancipatory action learning research approach (Kemmis 1993) to be used in the study might indicate better ways to implement APD with emerging technologies.
In each instance, teachers will be provided with designed blog environments based around the groundbreaking blog tools WordPress MultiUser (http://mu.wordpress.org/) and the WordPress plug-in FeedWordPress (link). In each instance every learner will be able to create and maintain their own blog space and will be encouraged to individualise the environment as much as they choose and will be informed that they retain full ownership of the content and environment after the course has finished. Each teaching environment will have it’s own ‘river of news’ aggregator covering all learners and the teacher or that course and learners will also be encouraged to use an individual aggregator with a recommendation of the free tool Bloglines (http://bloglines.com) initially.
Teachers will be supported and be asked to approach the use of blogs from their own pedagogical perspectives. However, use of the tools as individual, aggregated and subvertable areas will be encouraged as will broad and interpretative assessment techniques. Teachers will be encouraged to use, as demonstrated by Gibson (2004), a blog to facilitate, model and engage learners and will also be asked to keep a personal blog, in part to reflect on their experiences within the project.
Conclusion
This paper has aimed to briefly review several different studies of the pedagogy of blogging. It has also outlined studies underway at the University of Technology Sydney and to be undertaken at Deakin University. The paper has been constructed with a particular focus on the analysis of the communication dynamics of blogs and their associated technologies and the impact upon pedagogy and online communication within particular online learning environments. It has attempted to argue that a fuller appreciation of the importance of blogs as individual and aggregated online communication tools within sound pedagogical frameworks can lead to better applications of the technology in teaching and learning in tertiary education.
Having said this, the broad scope and relative reliance upon interpretative study of previous explorations of the area indicates that in many ways this is to a degree a theoretical examination. The results of future research, in particular at Deakin University and the University of Technology Sydney, will do much to clarify and further inform discussion and the increasingly common use of blogs in higher education throughout the world will no doubt add much to the debate. Further research in the area of the impact of aggregation on communication patterns, the development of individual identity through blogs and the different impacts of multiple online communication technologies is appropriate and necessary.
In addition, longitudinal studies , where the practice of learners can be measured and researched across timeframes beyond a single semester, are expected to further provide enhanced frameworks for knowledge development as the learner – author/editor of the web publishing environment – further engages with the opportunities presented by these technologies. In this sense too, the use of RSS, an XML language most closely associated with the semantic web and future developments in internet technology, should provide a degree of ‘future-proofing’ for these developments.
Web publishing technologies are providing educators with radical new opportunities, but simply mixing them within existing institutional paradigms will not be sufficient. Strategies for embracing technologies must not be constrained by currently available or popular options; consideration must be given to future and possible applications of newly emergent technologies as well. A clear commitment to implementing pedagogical strategies that are underpinned by the application of theoretical frameworks and research is to be encouraged if we, as practitioners and researchers, are to fully and responsibly enhance the opportunities presented by the dynamics of personalised, collaborative learning environments. Education may not be a location anymore – it will be an activity – discretely embedded in the lifestyles of our learners.
“If you don’t know where you are going, then it doesn’t matter which road you take, does it?”
Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
Boud, D. (2001), Using journal writing to enhance reflective practice. In English, L.M. and Gillen, M.A. (eds) Promoting Journal Writing in Adult Education, New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education no. 90. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, pp.9-18
Shön, D. A. (1987), Education the Reflective Practitioner, Jossey-Bass, USA
Various Authors (2005) Atom (standard) Wikipedia [viewed 22 June]
Vygotsky, L. (1978), Mind in Society, Harvard University Press, USA
Wells, G. (2000), Dialogic Inquiry in Education: Building on the Legacy of Vygotsky. In Lee, C.D. & Smargorinsky, P. (eds) Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry, Cambridge University Press, USA.
As I may have mentioned in the dim & distant past every second semester I roll out of consultation mode and into some genuine hands on teaching (oooo) in our Graduate Certificate of Higher Education.
So I’m limbering up the old ed-tech-pedagogy limbs and having what is now an annual crack at getting people interested in emerging technologies. And this year I’ve got WordPress MU and FeedWordPress to help out.
Basically what I’ve done is created a bit of a mini-blogger for the course, participants roll along, set up their blog (using WPMU) and each blog is then aggregated centrally (using summaries) through FeedWordPress. Simple huh :o)
What would be really cool though at this stage would be a little observational help from an outside perspective and also a bit of php assistance…
1. Imagining that you weren’t the savvy geek that you are ;) would this make sense to you? It’s an optional element with no compulsory posting… just the suggestion that you’ll be better off doing think kind of thing and I do get to ‘introduce’ it (30 seconds) face-to-face… otherwise it’s entirely online… any ideas how I could improve it?
2. Do you think I should give participants the option of subscribing by email? I kinda want them to get an aggregator under their belt but am worried that I’ll exclude the few that come aboard through this. (and do you think that Bloglines is the best suggestion)
3. I want to set the code in WPMU to email not only the person who has set up a new blog but also me. However, I’m not cluey enough with php to be able to figure this out… any idea what I’d need to insert into the code below to make this happen? (it’s in wp-newblog.php if anyone is that involved with this)
`< $message_headers = 'From: ' . stripslashes($_POST['weblog_title']) . ' ‘;
$message = __(“Dear User,\n\nYour new WordPressMU blog has been successfully set up at:\n”.$url.”\n\nYou can log in to the administrator account with the following information:\n Username: “.$wpblog.”\n Password: “.$random_password.”\nLogin Here: “.$url.”wp-login.php\n\nWe hope you enjoy your new weblog.\n Thanks!\n\n–James Farmer\nhttp://mu.wordpress.org/\n”);
@mail($_POST[ ‘admin_email’ ],__(‘New WordPress MU Blog’), $message, $message_headers);>`
A colleague just asked me by email how she could get started edublogging.
She wants to build contacts with ‘peers / students/ friends / strangers’ in her area (education, culture), get feedback on her PhD research and generally ‘get into’ blogging.
I fired off this quick advice, do you reckon it’s appropriate:
First up: Go create a blog at IncSub Blogs (hey, it’s the best free edublogging service I know :o)
Then:
1. Start writing… useful / interesting stuff that other people will react to / value as information
2. Search Google for blogs that are in the area you are thinking about and comment on their blog / email them your blog describing the kind of things you are doing and would like to get feedback on (many will have blogrolls which will be good places to check for similar blogs)
Wow, via Stephen this is a great article on implementing blogs in a tertiary learning environment: A Learning Blogosphere (Part 1) (Part 2).
Just a few thoughts first up… it’s a real shame that they didn’t use Bloglines as I’d’ve liked to know how that went. Instead though they used a kinda Drupal-esque group aggregator of the type favoured by Dave Winer. Personally I like both the folders and the river but most of all the personal control so I’m a little surprised and kinda pleased that:
“The aggregator held four days of information. Through the end of the class, about 80% of students used this option for keeping up with the class.”
The discussion of trackbacks and the large amount of value they add in part 1 is pretty interesting too, I guess the problem there is that spam is about to kill trackbacks (perhaps?), are pingbacks any safer?
Part 2 introduces itself pretty well, sell this to the ‘it’ll be more work’ lobby:
“Over the course of the term, there were 1,078 posts in the blogosphere. The number of posts represents a doubling in online communication over when interaction in the course occurred principally in email. Student posts accounted for 78% of this volume and determined the content of the discussion. The group leader (professor) level of involvement represents a halving of moderator effort relative to the email method. Thus, the use of blogging tools, specifically RSS, appears to have led to a quadrupling of moderator productivity over email.”
Following this is what I long for, statistical, hard-nosed evidence of learner centred online learning facilitated, it would seem, in many ways by the tools and environments that were used. Can’t wait for the third instalment. These are an absolute must-read-and-share-with-the-world coupla posts!
Problem is that I still don’t get it… even with photo / audio / video stuff all you really need is for them to be titled well and in context and you’ve got tags-a-plenty, when it comes to blog posts, well… isn’t it fairly obvious?
I mean, I can’t help but notice that some blogs I really like have introduced TTs and I read the post, look at the tags and go ‘well, duh, you’ve already used all those words in your post’. OK, so I can go to the Technorati tag page and look at postings by tag but so what, why don’t I just run a search through Feedster or Bloglines?
Plus, and this comes for a recent odd experience subscribing to a watchlists too, they’re all totally out of date / mixed up. For example I looked at the ‘Blog’ tag today (March 10th) and just down the list is this:
Which leads to this article which is obviously from February 19th… eh?
Don’t get me wrong I think that Technorati is a great idea and playing around with tags and stuff is well worth it for the experimenting but if the basic system doesn’t work then you can be as good an idea as you want!
Tom posts about weblogging / eportfolioing in schools from a “progressive comprehensive school reform” angle and looking towards “a progressive, authentic approach to standards-based assessment”. Good stuff!
Personally I reckon that what he asks for, namely as system which allows him to:
“* View entries for a given course, e.g., English 11, across different sections and teachers.
* View entries related to a specific unit, e.g., quatratic equations.
* View entries related to units which address a common standard, e.g., all units which address the bill of rights.
* View entries by 9th grade students.
* View entries by all students in my advisory.”
Isn’t far off the kind of system that CMSs, Blogs, Aggregation, ePortfolios and Digital Objects Management Systems are going to blend into in the not too distant future… hopefully.
In the meantime though here’s a theoretical hack solution using WPMU and a yet to be released web-based, independently hosted aggregation / email service.
-Using LDAP independent Blog/CMSs are created for each learner
-Using LDAP as well OPML files are generated for class(es) / year / ‘house’ (posh school hangover ;o) etc. These pre-populate the aggregators which are also assigned to individual students (School library also has set of subject specific OPML packages but that’s another area)
-These OPML files are also easily extractable to independent aggregators
-For each course a ‘category’ is automatically created in each individuals students blog… tags are available for each category covering specific units / standards
-These categories and blogs are automatically registered by year, class, advisory, student / musical interest / sporting stuff etc. etc. for easily viewable access.
Naturally these blogs have all the functionality of a sleek CMS, wonderful editing tools, wiki-esque potential for collaboration, simple authentication processes etc. etc. etc. and they’re all hosted behind a school firewall but with the RSS able to ‘get out’.
But I don’t reckon it’s that far off or that hard… where I do think it’ll fall down though is if one systems tries to do it all. The idea above is kind of a WordPress / Plone / Any dbase / Bloglines-esque aggregator type solution, any ‘all-encompassing’ would surely fall over standards / interoperability-wise as well as provide insufficient tools for the job? Perhaps?
