Blogtalk

ESL & Native English Classmates Learning Together

http://anvil.gsu.edu/wrinkles/

In this example, weblogs are being used as a way to facilitate english as a second language learning. The main motivations in using blog technology seem to be that they enable simple web publishing for the students, and that they

"offer the possibility of further discussion and interaction from a much wider audience. This audience can respond to what the students have written by giving suggestions or simply commenting on their writing and the content. This acknowledges the students' efforts plus provides a motivating force."

This particular example comes from K-12; does it seem possible that such an exercise might work in a post-secondary ESL context? Do some of the pereceived 'benefits' of using blogs to facilitate this exercise seem like benefits to you, or could you achieve them using other mechanisms already at your disposal, without the associated risks? What do you think some of those risks might be?

Blogging at the Computer Writing and Research Lab, U of Texas

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/teachers/blogs.shtml

Here's another example I came across recently of an ed tech department trying to support blogging on their campus. I came across this by way of the paper they cite at the end, "Welcome to the Blogshpere: Using Weblogs to Create Classroom Community." It looks at some of the uses that can be made of blogs in the online classroom, and the kind of 'community' they promote, which while definitely different than closed CMS or threaded discussion boards is community nonetheless. Finally, also from the same institution is this example of an online class exercise where the instructor proposes that students use blogs as a coordination tool to help in the drafting of a group proposal.

Weblogs for mentoring

I don't use weblogs myself in teaching, as I don't really see an application for my subject (math) right now other than possibly as a simple course blog for announcements or some such. What did get me interested in the idea of weblogs in education a few years back was looking at Lloyd Nebres' The Internet Classroom and the Advanced Internet Classroom, part of UC Berkeley's Academic Talent Development Program. (See AIC2003 for the latest version of the latter course, for example.) It's been written about before, so rather than re-articulating points already well articulated elsewhere, let me point you to the excellent 2000 article (originally called A Pedagogy of Nudges) by Laura Shefler. The whole article is interesting and relevant; please read at least the first page to see what I'm talking about in the following.

The key to the process is Lloyd. Lloyd's avocation is mentoring, an avocation he practices with these kids not only during the summer course itself, but often long afterwards. Links to their individual weblogs line his own weblog's sidebar. Though he teaches at Berkeley only for the six weeks of the course (he appears to spend much of his time in Maui), his posts reflect his continuing involvement with his mentees (here and here and here and ... )

Two factors I think keep the kids motivated to write:

• Each has his/her own personal weblog. Most not only post to their weblogs, they often design very individualistic decors for them. Their weblogs become something they own, their own personal space, their own voice - not a class weblog run by a teacher that they're invited (or expected) to contribute to, in which their individual identities become merged into a collective identity.
• There's a community here, but not a community of writers as much as a community of listeners. Lloyd and the other students not only listen, they respond, and nothing is more motivating for continued blogging than someone else saying "I'm listening".

How well would this sort of setup work in general for education? It's obviously very labour intensive; not many of us have the time or energy for mentoring at this level. I'd guess it'd probably not work at all if the aim is to get students blogging about some course topic they may or may not find interesting or relevant. Lloyd's kids are most involved when they're writing about something that's personally meaningful to themselves, their own lives. What's going on here is not so much learning as self-actualization: kids discovering who they are and what's important to them by writing about themselves, with the aid of a very capable mentor.

Lloyd is using blogs in what I think is their most powerful educational form: nurturing individual thought rather than community discussion or collaboration. I like Laura Shefler's take on it: " 'constructing knowledge' does not necessarily mean constructing consensus". Successful community blogs do exist, but they tend to be the work of several editors collecting newsbits rather than thought-out expression - Boing Boing rather than Riverbend. In my opinion, weblogs, at their best and most powerful, are the work of individuals, not communities. If we're going to use blogs in education, I think that this individuality is the aspect we need to foster most, whether within a course structure or outside one.

Some time in the future - perhaps in the very distant future - I think mentoring will become an essential part of education. Learning is already becoming more distributed across space and time, and we've started to look at teaching content online via disconnected "learning object" chunks instead of full courses. As this trend continues, mentors could very well become the keystones of learning, helping students to integrate the various strands of what they're learning into a meaningful whole, to make sense of it all. Alexei Panshin's science fiction classic Rite of Passage presents one possible model for a mentored learning future. Mentoring by blogs - or whatever they evolve into - could be another useful way to go.

Course Blogging

At the moment I've got three course blogs:
Shop Talk (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/shoptalk/) for students in our new Professional Communications Certificate Program
Legal Technicalities (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/legals/) for the Legal Secretarial students
T.Recs (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/trecs/) for the Outdoor Rec students

When you visit them, you'll notice a lack of activity—just a couple of student comments, and everything else is teacher-generated. I've recently invited my students to become joint authors, and while a couple of them have expressed interest, no one has taken up the invitation yet. I'll be delighted if and when they do.

The tentative conclusion I'm drawing from this is that students have to be as interested as the teacher in the blog as a way of succeeding in the course. We (relatively) early adopters often forget that our colleagues and students aren't always as interested in these gimmicks as we are.

So unless the experience of showing up and contributing to the course blog is a happy and productive one, students will give the blog little or no attention.

I can put something on the blog that's critical to some short-term need of the class, like a heads-up about a snap quiz, and I've done something like that with the Legals (whose program induces a lot of quiz anxiety). Students, being highly efficient, don't want to expend any excess time and energy on a course. If blogging seems unneeded for course success, they'll avoid it.

That puts the onus on me to figure out ways to make the blog seem at least as important as the textbook and other learning materials. Well, I'm working on it!

Blogs as possible lightweight ePortfolio platform

http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/blogshop/archives/000062.html

We are very fortunate to be following in the footsteps of some real trailblazers who have already experimented with introducing blogs in an online setting. One such person is Alan Levine from the Maricopa Community Colleges who developed one of the first so-called 'blogshops' aimed at educators.

One of the ideas explored there was that of using blogs as the basis for an easy (and cheap!) 'eportfolio' system for students. As an example, he points to a eportoflio developed by a student, Ryan Eby that used blog software for its basis.

Since then people in Alan's community college system at Chandler-Gilbert CC have gone on to implement a blogging based eportfolio system for both students and staff alike.

This last example is one where blogs are being used less because of their characteristic of creating chronological ordered 'posts' and more simply because they are very inexpensive, simple to use, personally-focused publishing systems. And the software used to implement this was FREE. The post by Alan is well worth reading in detail as he freely admits this idea is not without its problems and challenges.

What do you think? Has anything you've seen so far made you think this idea is viable? What problems could you forsee with trying to re-purpose blog software to publish eportfolios?

Gina Bennett's comments on Blogs as new narrative format

I wanted to highlight this comment left by Gina Bennett a few days back. (The *fact* that I have to highlight probably belies one of the things that has likely become evident through the course of this 'discussion' - blogs on their own are not really a good mechanism for threaded or 'focused' discussions. The facilitators were pretty aware of this coming in, but took the chance for the opportunity to expose people directly to the medium.)

But as Gina says:

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.

Boy don't I know this sense of feeling like you are "talking to ourselves"! (maybe now more than ever ;-)

Gina goes on to say:

"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...

Great ideas! These are exactly some of the reasons I've seen given by other educators for why they are atrracted to blogs as a potential medium.

We had another reflection through the mailing list from Laurie McAvoy that one potential use she could see was for "Reflective Practice Journals." And we've also had Crawford suggest that 'student publishing' in general is another potential use, although as he points out not without its perils.

Any other ideas? Anyone intrigued enough yet to have set up their own blog? Tried to access some of the blogs out there with an RSS Reader?

Matrix of Uses of Blogs in Education

Hopefully from the posts over the last few days you've gotten a better sense of what blogs are, and how you can access them and maybe even create your own. Now we get to move on to the more exciting stuff - how you might use this technology as educators.

We introduced working with blogs in two steps on purposes - though people often only focus on writing when they discuss blogs, for me blogging is a combination of both writing and reading. Working from this premise, I threw together this matrix of the possible uses of blogs in education. (You can also access this as a static image instead of a Word doc if you don't have Word.)

Some caveats here - this matrix only really considers students, instructors and 'the rest of the net' as actors. Obviously one could add much to this - librarians, institutional RSS feeds, other academic workers... That's why I titled it 'Some' uses of blogs in education. And even just considering this limited set of actors, I have definitely left much off. And I didn't try to enumerate all of instructional events and applications you could facilitate through blogs (e.g. webquests as one example). My goal here was to illustrate that blogs are about both writing and reading, and that one's professional practice and ones instructional practice can be facilitated with the same technology. Does this give you any more ideas on how you could incorporate these into your own practice?

As a preamble to the upcoming discussions on other potential uses, you might also be interested in this set of examples of courses using blogs in education.

General Applications of Weblogs

Blogs first emerged in the mid-1990s, and their growth since then has been explosive. It's also seen the rapid division of blogs into various genres.

The first of these might be called Hunter-Gatherers. Such blogs result from Web searches that bring useful or entertaining sites into one convenient spot. Hunter-gatherer blogs were the original genre, and their descendants still include that function even when they're more concerned about the individual blogger than anything else.

The current major genre might be called the introvert blog--it's all about the author's personal life. One of the striking aspects of this genre is the author's denigration of himself: the blog is purported to be "chaos," "random," "neurotic," and generally disorganized.

The content bears this out; posts are often highly self-critical, describing work not done, tests flunked, relationships failed. Even long gaps in the blogging record require mention and apology. Against this background, occasional highlights appear: a wonderful concert attended, a happy dinner with family, a new job. No need to single out any examples; they're all over the blogosphere.

The audience for such blogs consists, I'd guess, of the author and a small number of friends, who will sometimes post encouraging responses. The Book of Job somehow springs to mind.

Another kind of personal record is in the extrovert blog, in which the author pays more attention to the surroundings. A great example is Big White Guy in Hong Kong, a Canadian expat's funny and opinionated view of life in his adopted city.

Another genre is the job blog, in which the focus is on events at work. Depending on your interest in the job, this can be boring or fascinating. One of my favourites in this genre is Oh Jen Jen's It's a Zoo Out There. She's a medical officer at Changi General Hospital in Singapore. Last spring her blog was a mesmerizing narrative of the hospital's struggle to contain SARS--a struggle that cost the lives of several admired colleagues. Dr. Oh's blog is clearly aimed at her colleagues, but during the height of the SARS outbreak she was being read around the world. Now she's back to routine emergency-room problems and talking about her favourite TV programs.

The specialist blog can be a variant of the job blog, but the specialty may be just one aspect of the job, or a hobby. The specialist is clearly speaking to colleagues, comfortable with a technical vocabulary that may baffle outsiders. Emphasis here is often more on the audience than on the author, with plenty of links to other specialist sites. My site Writing Fiction is an example; I try to provide a convenient spot to get a lot of information on the subject.

A good example of a specialist blogger is Clay Shirky, who writes some very interesting and thoughtful material about Internet communications issues.

Here's one interesting difference between most blogs and introvert blogs: the introvert blogs tend to run long, long paragraphs, while the others tend to present short posts or at least long posts broken up into very short paragraphs.

I suspect that's because the non-introvert blogs are aimed more at the reader, and the author realizes (instinctively or not) that long paragraphs are hard to read on a computer screen. For the same reason, introvert blogs often have designs that make them hard to read--greyish text, for example, on a dark background. The readership is less important here than providing a blog that mirrors the author's feelings.

Advocacy blogs interest me a lot; I first got into blogging by visiting news and advocacy blogs in the run-up to the Iraq War. Advocacy blogs tend to be one-sided (here's my opinion and here are the blogs that agree with me), but a few do invite visitors to check out the evil blogs of the opposition. In any case, they offer a useful service by gathering news stories (and blog posts) from a host of sources and putting them all in one spot.

A good place to get a wide range of advocacy blogs is The Agonist, a Texas-based newsgathering site that offers frequent updates plus a long list of blogs ranging right across the (American) political spectrum. Many advocacy blogs reflect extremist views--for example, The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. Most tend to side with more mainstream views, whether to right or left.

And where in all this do education blogs fit in? Clearly, some of us are very interested in the educational potential of this medium, but blogs often look like a solution in search of a problem. I can see both dull and interesting uses for blogs. Let's start with dull:

Administration. You can post news about your school, department, or class and expect everyone to drop in when the news is still fresh. This can work, but many people don't drop in. An email list can often do the job much better because it doesn't depend on the decisions of the readers.

Less dull is enhancement. You can post items on a blog to offer students more work in a problem area, or even to hold mini-tutorials online with questions and answers. But again this depends on everyone's showing up and asking questions. If you visit my course blog Legal Technicalities, you'll see that my students haven't contributed much. (I made them an offer today—if anyone wants to become a joint author, I'll give them an account. We'll see if anyone takes me up on it.)

Most interesting is the possibility of publishing—putting student work up on the site for the world to see. I like this idea because I want students to experience taking part in the whole world of public discourse. It's the way a society does its thinking. But I can imagine that many teachers would be reluctant to put their students' work up on a blog.

For one thing, it might expose the kids to predators or online stalkers. Not a nice thought. For another, the kids might stir up controversy ("What are you teaching those kids, anyway?"). It may even look like just another time sink, when teachers and students alike are working flat out just to keep up with the regular curriculum.

But if blogs have a future in education, publishing is probably that future. I'd love to hear what others think.

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?