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Tuesday, October 07, 2003
Subverting the Discussion Board
http://www.xplana.com/articles/archives/incorporated_subversion2
A post today from the "outside world" on using blogs as an alternative to threaded discussions in the online classroom. It seemed especially relevant in light of some of the initial reactions to the effects on 'discussion' being expressed here. To be fair to the author, and to us, we have set this site up differently than one would for a class, basically so as to have an incredibly low barrier for you to add your thoughts, but at the expense of each having an 'individual' space.
So far we've been pretty much posting 'original' material to this site - this post represents another common usage of blogs - reposting articles and material found online, and adding one's own commentary or inserting them in a different context. Are their uses for this kind of 'link commentary' blogs you can think of in your online class? Do you have some thoughts on this particular article on how blogs might work as an alternative to threaded discussions?
Posted by Scott Leslie at 10:20 AM in Uses of Weblogs in Education | Permalink
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What I need, at this point, is a topic sentence. I've been aware of blogging for a while, and I'm quite comfortable with technology, and I teach online, so ... I'm not sure what this blogging is supposed to be an alternative to? Threaded discussions in webct, blackboard, firstclass? Those are not so different from blogs, as far as I can see, and the non-linear, all over the place, aspect of this blog site - so far - does nothing for me as a reader or an educator. What I'm trying to get at here is - why blogs? They seem, to me, to be several steps backward to the early days of unmoderated listservs and newsgroups, where one logged on to find pages of apparently unrelated discussion. I feel as if we're re-inventing the wheels that have just fallen off the wagon - to mix a few metaphors.
Curious, yes. Getting it? not yet.
Wendy
Posted by: Wendy Burton at October 7, 2003 02:29 PM
Wendy, so far we are just introducing the technology and phenomenom as there are many who have only experienced 'blogs' as a buzzword and are not clear yet even what it refers to.
To that end Brian offered a bit of an overview in his intro on what is a weblog and I've also tried to orient people to what they are seeing on this site. Our apologies if these or the site itself is unclear - if there's something specific you are finding confusing let us know and we'll try to explain more clearly.
But it sounds like you're already quite familiar with the phenomenom and the technology and already moving on to issues we hope to discuss later this week, e.g. general applications of weblogs and some case studies as to how people are actually using them in online classes.
If you're interested in exploring this issue ahead of time, you might check out some of the articles we posted on uses of weblogs in education and examples of courses using blogs.
No one here is really professing to be an expert in the use of blogs in the classroom, nor do I think you'll find any zealots who are convinced they are the only way forward. The facilitators all have some experience with blogs, both as a teaching tool and as a personal publishing/knowledge management tool, and the goal of the discussion as stated in the intro was to explore the "uses they may have for educators." You may well end up conculding that there are no such uses, which is I hope a valuable conclusion to reach. But the longish list of examples of people using them that I pointed to above as well as our own personal experiences are, I think, what prompted us as a group to think it was a topic worth exploring.
Cheers, Scott.
Posted by: Scott Leslie at October 7, 2003 02:54 PM
Well.... I don't know if I am "getting it" (with regards blogs) but I am starting to think about it differently. Unlike Wendy (above) I don't think that blogs are an alternative to some existing form as much as they are a somewhat new narrative form. You remember how we used to write emails when they first came out? We wrote them like letters: Dear So-&-so, then the properly formatted body of the letter, then the complimentary closing (Yours truly, etc.) You can still tell when someone is new to email: their messages sound so awkward & formal. It's the same with chat: certainly it took me a while to accept that spelling & punctuation didn't matter.
Whenever we get a new narrative form, it frees us to express ourselves a bit differently. From what I've experienced on this site, blogging is a more personal, more reflective & (sometimes maybe) more creative way to write than that we might use on a discussion board. On a discussion board, we are expected to stay on topic & follow the thread; in the blog, it seems that we are sort of talking to ourselves but with the hope that someone might be listening/reading over our shoulders. The act of reading a blog seems to call upon my active listening skills more than my debating skills.
I am starting to think about how this type of writing might be used for academic purposes. When do we want to push learners to think (or express themselves) more reflectively, more creatively? Maybe blogging could be used to assess learning outcomes that are more affective in nature; those pesky outcomes that have less to do with the development of knowledge & skills & more to do with the development of attitudes. Maybe a blogging activity could be used to practice freewriting or 'freethinking' exercises; an open-ended, personal exploration of anything from a video clip to a mathematical equation...
Posted by: Gina Bennett at October 7, 2003 03:25 PM
On the specific issue of how weblogs are different than threaded dicussions, there's an interesting piece at http://www.schoolblogs.com/tafefrontiers/stories/storyReader$39 that compares "Chat and Bulletin Boards vs Blogs." I read that piece as very much supporting what Gina writes above, that some of the perceived promise for blogs as educational tools is in enabling stronger more creative *personal* expression to emerge.
Posted by: Scott Leslie at October 7, 2003 03:36 PM
Why blogs? I can give a third world answer: Because they are cheap or free and any teacher can have a blog in any school. Blogs don't need high technical knowledge or expensive servers. If you have a computer and a connection to internet,you can type www.blogger.com and have a virtual classroom.
I'm from Brasil and can understand English but cannot write very well. I hope you can understand.
Regards,
Su
Posted by: Suzana at October 10, 2003 01:44 PM
Oi, Suzana!
You write English beautifully! And you're right--a blog can be a cheap way for teachers and students to gather information and send it to other people.
More and more, I think that a successful blog must include the students as co-authors. Computers and the Web make teachers and students much more equal. But that worries many teachers...and many students!
Abraços,
Crawford
Posted by: Crawford Kilian at October 10, 2003 08:07 PM
I haven't seen many specific examples yet, but I'm very impressed with the efforts of this one New Jersey school Principal in making an extensive set of blogs for his students and their parents. See these: HCRHS Subscriptions page; The Principal's Corner.
Posted by: Kate Britt at October 17, 2003 03:01 PM