Recently in Blogs Category
I know it's another foreign language example, but ... I do like this Far from Moscow blog which combines audio, picture and photos to get you the latest info on the Russian pop music scene.
This is a totally Web 2.0 design, but from a usability perspective, it has some features which help you navigate the site if you're new to Russian pop music. First, I appreciate that a Front Page link is included - there really are a lot of people out there who aren't familiar with clicking the logo to return to the front page.
Second, I do like the categories links on the side (it also works with tags). Who knew there was Russian reggae? A third feature of note is that there are static tutorial Pages with information about the Web site, links to labels and other information. Again, if you're a new to the world of Russian pop music...you may know where to get a basic primer. Finally, the entries themselves are written with the general audience in mind. Many include a short intro to the artist as well as links to audio clips.
This is a good example of how a blog can introduce you to the basics of a topic, then keep you updated in little ckunks (did anyone say "Just in Time Learning").
The biggest surprise of all....it's sponsored by the UCLA Slavic Department (specifically David MacFayden). It's really great to see an Web site from an academic that really understands how to deploy the new tech!
P.S. There's some good music on here. I have no idea if it's on iTunes.
Sometimes blogs get a bad name (because, let's face it, some blogs are better than others). But if we didn't have bad blogs, where would we get parody blogs from?
Like this gem from Santa Clause:
Sunday 23 December 07 - I really can't be bothered with Christmas this year. I will give it a rest until 2009.
That's telling them Santa!
Another blog how-to article from the New York Times caught my eye, and I thought I would follow its advice and post to my blog.
like this article because it addresses a complaint I hear from my busy colleagues - namely that they are too busy to blog. This is the article that actually realizes that bloggers have a day job and may not have as much time. But maybe this article can help you think of blogging as a mini work break or "destresser".
Actually, I would say that once you get started, you may not be able to stop...
P.S. You can skip the part that mentions you probably won't make money. I think most of us knew that already.
We're selecting books to recommend for the upcoming TLT Symposium, and we thought we would blog about some of them. One of our likely selections will be Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom by Will Richardson.
Should you buy?
This book is written for the instructor who is completely new to the Web 2.0 world. If you've heard of "blogs" and "wikis" only as buzzwords, but want to know more, this is for you. I should mention that it's aimed for a K-12 instructor audience, but I think most of the principles apply to higher education. It starts out with definitions of the terms, adds educationally sound examples then shows you some tools to get you started. It also covers issues important to instructors such as making sure students understand the rules of blogging in your course. It also has great coverage of one of the most important "hidden" technologies - RSS.
Another great feature is that it's short and to the point, and for busy instructors, this could be the tipping point of whether the book gets read or not. But short does not mean incomplete - far from it. Richardson manages to touch on blogs, wikis, podcasting, RSS, tagging, mashups, social bookmarking (aka del.icio.us) and image galleries (aka "Flickr"). I think this is a book that will help you "get" Web 2.0.
The other good news is that even if you've become "Web 2.0" savvy, you'll still find great examples and new tools to consider. Even now, I'm looking at Flickr in a new way.
Sumamry
This is great for the Web 2.0 newbie who needs it all explained and helpful for Web 2.0 veterans who can always a few more new ideas.
I used to be involved in a project which created Flash animations and graphics for different courses. One question I was asked was how applicable it was across disciplines.
For instance, do I really expect a philosophy instructor be interested in an animation of supercritical fluids? Actually I don't...But would a philosophy course focusing on Greco-Roman schools of philosophies be interested in a set of historical maps, like the one we did for a Jewish history course? Maybe they would.
This leads to the larger question of whether academic discipline matters when considering tools. On the one hand, it doesn't matter. All courses have target learning outcomes (changes in skills/attitudes you want to see in your students), and the process for mapping objectives and tools should be the same no matter which course you are designing.
But here's a caveat - courses vary widely in their objectives. Even in the philosophy department, a course that focuses on ancient philosophy may share objectives with a history course as well as a course in modern policy, while a formal logic course may have goals similar to an algebra course.
I think that to expect the same courses to use tools in the same ways is doing them a disservice. So instructors naturally benchmark themselves with similar to theirs (i.e. a logic instructor is probably interested inother logic courses).
There are many tools like blogs, images and audio that can be applied in many disciplines, but the uses may have different nuances. Podcasting is a great way for students to create their own interviews (journalism), but is also a great way to capture the sounds of a natural environment (biology) or compare dialect samples (linguistics).
I can truly see three different courses in which students are creating audio, but it's not the same audio. I can also see courses where students aren't necessarily creating audio (maybe blogging is better because you need to learn the craft of writing concrete poetry, include phonetic symbols or explain still photos).
As an instructional designer, I like to look at examples from different disciplines because I do learn more about the capabilities and possibilities of a new tool. And maybe I will find that a technique from math can also work in a philosophy course like logic.
But I've been seeing that my colleagues are able to migrate between systems. I'm not spying - my RSS reader is registering the feeds as brand new entries (interesting).
I do want to give a sincere thanks for trusting in the Blogs upgrade despite our bug reports. And if you experience a problem, you can always find us at blogs@psu.edu...
First, I found earlier that the export files from IE7 are funky to say the least, so I used Firefox (and documented this new quirk). The other gotcha is that you have to Publish (circle arrow button in top menu) in order for the new entries to appear - unfortunately the system does not prompte me (sigh).
In terms of logistics, my big concern was that I not loose my custom widgets. You have to create a new blog so you can import and configure it, but you still want access to the old blog, so for me the key was hold off publishing the new blog as long as possible. Ignore the publish messages until you are ready, then press the circle arrows at the end.
But as you can see - I'm up and running on this blog. The other ones might be trickier because I really did create custom styles and tweaked the template.
I just saw that my ETS colleague Brad Kozlek wrote about open blogging in a science lab and I honestly have to agree that this is a good model.
In a recent round table with instructors using Blogs at Penn State, one of them mentioned that he specifically wanted his students to blog in the open (i.e. anyone can see the posts)...because he felt that students would pay more attention to what they wrote if they knew anyone could stumble across it.
I do maintain both an open and a private blog, and again I would agree that the writing on my open blog is much more coherent. I'm glad that I do have some open blog venues out there and I am getting a chance to use them to try out some ideas in public. Similarly, if a scientist is training to keep an usable lab journal, a public blog is a good way to sharpen the focus.
I think one caveat for this discussion is that I would say that a research journal may be semi-public genre. A lot of the entries from the Redfield Lab Postdoc Blogs were noting investigations and results from that day and are a bit technical in nature. On the other hand, more than a few are referring to Meatloaf (the musician) and Queens of the Stone Age (also musicians). There's no doubt that a blog is a little funkier than a formal research paper.
Still... I maintain that we need to carefully to define what constitutes "public" and "private" in the blogosphere and when each is appropriate.
I know, I'm stubborn.
We've been having some interesting discussions on how the expand and explain the full capabilities of our Movable Type Platform.
Movable Type is the engine for Blogs at Penn State, but blogs are not it's only capability. With the new system you have easier control over "static" pages which can be connected to your main blog...which means you have more control over your Web space than ever. You can post your photos and videos, write commentary and create resources for yourself (you could have your key links on one page and a static public resume on another)
There's been a lot interesting talk at ETS about how we can encourage students to use the Movable Type platform to document their Penn State life and maybe develop a professional portfolio at the end. Blogs are great for dotting down your "thought du jour", but it could be more than that. Perhaps the most exciting possibility is that this process can "nudge" students into "reflection" (do these thoughts tie together somehow?) and maybe even "exploration" (I talked about concept A...what's the next step?)
But - how can we explain this vision to the Penn State educational community? Blogs and portfolios are two pieces of the puzzle, but there may be more. Is there a common metaphor that everyone can understand?
Well, here's my modest proposal. Maybe we're talking about the "notebook" process. Like real notebooks, Movable Type can be very flexible. Some people use notebooks for diaries, others for short stories and poems, and others may draw in theirs. Some people may have one notebook for everything (all tasks in one place) and others may have several notebooks for different topics (one class, one notebook). At some point, a notebook can be re-edited for a professional portfolio...or you could just share the one you have.
But there are some powerful features in the electronic Movable Type Notebook that aren't in a traditional paper notebook. One is that it's easy to share. If you want your friend to see your class notes - you won't have to worry about your friend losing it or not getting it back to you. Not only that, but I can get to my electronic notebook from any computer
Another is that you can stuff in more media (like a video) than in a paper notebook. It's also easier to incorporate "outside material." If I see a link I like, I can plug it into my blog. With a paper notebook, I would need an extra folder just for handouts...or I have to invest in three hole punch.
And maybe the nicest benefit of all is that I can type instead of write. Anyone who has seen my rapid handwriting knows it's not too easy to read.
So that's it - a blog as a notebook. Will this metaphor make the process easier to grasp? I'm not sure yet - it's just an idea I jotted down.
Now that the semester is winding down, I did want to talk a little bit about how blogging is progressing in my course and if either the students or the instructor have learned anything.
A while ago, I wrote what may appear to be a bleak entry on blogging in the classroom (Why Johnny Won't Blog in Class). It was a discussion on whether students would "voluntarily" blog for all courses or whether instructors need to gently prod them (via blog assignments). Although I wonder if most students will ever do more work than we ask them to do, I do think we can make "required work" interesting work.
Truthfully, I've been quite pleased with how the students in my course are doing. Students may not normally choose to blog, but once they are asked to do so, they have been writing down some very thoughtful responses. I've done both ANGEL discussion boards and blogs, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how much longer the blog posts are than discussion board posts. Normally, I would see 1-2 sentences in a discussion board, but most blog posts are usually 1-2 paragraphs...or longer. I've also seen more students do some "research on the side"
Like discussion boards, I've also gotten some really great posts from students who rarely speak in class (and good ones from the talkers too). There does seem to be something about the platform that seems to "liberate" people a bit. I should say that each student has an individual blog, so I'm curious to see if the same trend would continue for a joint course blog (I think it would actually).
I have learned a few things. One is that I do have to prod. I noticed that few students were commenting on each other's work (even when I dropped major hints and posted the links to the other blogs). So finally, I made an assignment where they were asked to review the other blogs and make a comment. But...they did give some interesting answers and a few said they were glad to be reading what others were doing.
Another thing I've learned myself is to make the blog assignments as open ended as possible. For most of the blog assignments, I gave a students a research assignment of picking a language, buying a cheap textbook then having report on various aspects of it. In the beginning, questions were fairly specific and students didn't always have the integrated technical skills set they needed (part of my learning curve).
Interestingly, after one particularly tricky assignment on figuring out pronunciation based on just the textbook, I asked students in the following week to comment about it. I got a lot of great responses about language textbook design and why they are set up the way they are. Many of my students will be teaching foreign language, so it's great to see them thinking about the nature of language teaching.
Later I began to make questions more specific and even formed one as a "scavenger hunt" (what's the weirdest grammatical feature of your language). Again better answers going in unexpected directions. I'm even beginning to see stirrings of more of a life-long interest in some students as we're progressing in the semester. They may be learning to take a little more "ownership" of their own curriculum as we hoped in the beginning.
I'm not sure if students will pick up the blogging habit for every course, but I hope other instructors will. I'm still learning the ropes to making an effective blog assignment, but I really believe that blogging forced my students to go into the "meta-cognitive" realm which I normally don't see in a traditional blog-less course.
