Category: Blogs and Wikis

Another Glimpse into the Future?

Link To: Weblogg-ed – The Read/Write Web in the Classroom

One of the themes I’ve been returning to often is that the K-12 teachers in the trenches are shaping the future for those of us in higher education to a far greater extent than most of us in the college and university arena realize. Here’s a partial program lineup from the Illinois Technology Conference, courtesy of Will Richardson.

* “No more excuses, it’s time to start blogging” full day workshop by Steve. (No seats left)
* “iPods in the Classroom” full day workshop with Karen Percak. (Full)
* “Read, Write and Blog” full day workshop with Susim Munshi. (Full)
* “Wikis and Weblogs as School Communication Tools” full day workshop with Tim Lauer. (No seats left.)
* “The New Read/Write Web: Transforming the Classroom” and “What’s Up with Wikis?” by, um…that would be me.
* “Blogging– Revolutionize Education” by Susim Munshi and Susan Switzer
* “Got Wikis?” by David Jakes
* “Web Based Communication Tools for Schools” by Tim Lauer
*Flickr in the Classroom” by David Jakes
* “Using iPods for Student Learning” by Karen Percak
* “Podcasting 101” by Steve Dembo
* “Telling the New Story” by David Warlick
* “Radio For Kids, By Kids” by Tony Vincent”

Interesting implications….

Can Blogging be Serious and Experimental?

Link to: Inside Higher Ed :: Serious Bloggers

This piece by Wayne State assistant professor Jeff Rice, who blogs as Yellow Dog, highlights the chilling effect that articles like the Chronicle’s Bloggers Need Not Apply and the Business Week cover story Attack of the Blogs have had on academic bloggers. Even academics who are attracted to this new medium generally respond by either writing anonymously or by adopting a super-serious tone that robs the writing of the very energy that should be fueling it.

Writing a blog under a pseudonym is usually an argument that the only safe way for an academic to write publicly is to write anonymously. Our thoughts about students, grades, internal policy and even our private lives and interests can never be revealed to our colleagues or future colleagues or we risk losing all we have worked so hard for!

Students and colleagues lose out when we block this exchange. Our positions on issues of grading and curriculum and our feelings about our students are as central to our teaching as issues of what content to teach or what grants to apply for. Our community is enhanced when on-line tools can be used to give us additional insights about and access to the authentic understandings of those that meet with in classes, studios, labs or faculty meetings. Blogging offers an extremely rich set of tools help share those understandings..

Lost in this seriousness are a number of quite amazing things blogging has provided writers: ability to create discourse in widely accessed, public venues, ease of online publishing, ability to write daily to a networked space, ability to archive one’s writing, ability to interlink writing spaces, ability to respond to other writers quickly, etc.

One more voice to the chorus of those calling for those of us in higher education to use these new tools to connect, communicate and unfreeze our practice.

A Little Wabi Sabi Please

Link To: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Wikipedia and open source

As the debate on the accuracy of the Wikipedia goes on, I am reminded about the wiki:wabi sabi world view ( the appreciation of the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete).

Nicholas Carr, of IT should become boring, fame, continues to stir things up in the blogosphere. In this post he takes on the article from Nature that has requently been cited as vindicating the claim that the Wikipedia is [almost] as accurate a resource as Britannica. Carr’s careful reading of the supplemental materials raises some issues about the reliability the study and the validity of the conclusions. He has a number of specific problems:

  1. Many stories in blogs and in the more mainstream press have overemphasized the findings of the study and have glossed over the fact that the story in nature was a news story, not peer reviewed scientific article.
  2. He uses the supplemental materials (which are available on his site as a Word document) to examine how the Nature reporters filtered out some of the criticisms offered by the experts. They adjusted some of the expert findings to adjust for the expectations of the “typical encyclopedia user”.
  3. He cites some additional evidence that the inaccuracies in Wikipedia tended to somewhat more substantial than those in Britannica.

Ross Mayfield, who was at the open source conference where Mitch Kapur gave the speech that triggered the Carr post, responds pretty persuasively to the criticism on his blog. I like the Wikipedia as a personal resource, and I’d found myself referring to the nature article several times in the last week without really haven’t read it carefully. I’m a little more cautious now. As Mayfield’s post indicates, having folks like Nicholas Carr in the blogosphere is a huge advantage to sharpen our thinking, and it’s good to be reminded every now and again of the frailty of all of our knowledge systems.

Which is part of the point. No editing system, closed editorial process or open, is perfect. Instead focus on media literacy and a little wabi sabi.

Limitations of the Education Industry

Link to: CogDogBlog » Blog Archive » The Dissonance of “Blogs in Education”

There’s lots to chew on in this post from the CogDogBlog. Seems like the whole crew at the Northern Voices conference got their juices flowing and there are more provocative ideas floating around than I can absorb. I think Alan’s discomfort with the term “Blogs in Education” hits on a fundamental problem that will constantly plague us as tools for individualized learning proliferate. The key distinction to me is between “education” and “learning”.

Back when I was doing career counseling, I spent a lot of time trying to help students understand the difference between a job and an industry. Jobs are things that you do, like writing process, creating images, or counting beans; industries are the environments that you do those jobs in. (That’s the simplified version; the longer version requires the use of props like paper plates, but I digress.)

Education in the US is an industry, much like advertising, investment banking or luggage manufacturing, though bigger, and, some would say, with more noble goals. As an industry we have certain expectations that differentiate us from other industries. The higher education industry is defined–for better or worse–by the fact that we offer courses, evaluate what happens in those courses, and grant credit for those courses that other industries judge as being valuable. As an industry, we see most everything–including blogs and other social software–through the lense of courses or the support organizations that allow us to offer courses. (The research enterprise is an industry with its own rules of engagement.)

Learning is a job or an activity that can take place in multiple environments. Adult educators, led by Allen Tough, have tried to help the education industry understand that learning is centered with the individual–not with the industry, but with little success. Social software tools are empowering learners to be at the center of their own learning universe to an extent we could only imagine a few years ago. There’s going to be an amazing amount of dissonance and discomfort within the higher education industry as we try to break free of our conception of the course as the primary organizational tool of what should be our primary organizational activity (job)–learning by indviduals.

Making the Read/Write Web Accessible to Students

Link to: nonscholae.org at incorporated subversion

James Farmer has launched a site to help persuade school administrators of the importance of encouraging responsible use of blogs, instant messaging and other social software in schools. I hadn’t realized what a huge problem it is for teachers who want to try new technologies with their classes until members of my planning class explained the hoops they they had to go through merely to access their own professional blogs.

The problems these teachers face provides on reason why so many of our students come to college with plenty of experience in posting “facebook pictures of them half naked, drunk and swapping spit” and little experience sharing their more academic interests. Far too many schools make it far too difficult to integrate theses tools in meaningful ways, therefore leaving students to their own devices.

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Drupal Number Two in Multi-User Blogs

Link to: Blogsavvy: Professional Blog Consultant

Drupal came out number two in James Farmer’s survey of multi-user blogging engines. As we’ve been noticing in our work with Drupal in class, one obstacle to making it number one is the complexity of the vocabulary and the huge array of modules available to extend the functionality of the application.

Perhaps the most significant stumbling block for a first time installer however is to get around the conceptual differences between a ’story’, ‘page’ ‘blog’ and so on and that to a large degree this simplicity is based on a pretty solid understanding of this kind of vocabulary and the Drupal system.

WordPress Multi-User was number one in the list.

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Link to: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Jakob Nielsen, one of the ‘net’s leading experts on web usibility, site design, and designing effective user interfaces, has posted some suggestions for improving the readibility of your weblog. Blogging management systems frees writers from many of the compexities of web design, but following some relatively simple practices can make it easier for new readers to find their ways around your blog and increases the chances that they’ll return.

Some of the suggetions–like posting your picture on your blog or providing a detailed “about page”–might not be appropriate for anonymous blogs, but other suggestions remind us of ways that almost anyone’s writing could be improved.

Your posting’s title is microcontent and you should treat it as a writing project in its own right. On a value-per-word basis, headline writing is the most important writing you do.

Other tips concern navigation–like the effective use of categories.

Categories must be sufficiently detailed to lead users to a thoroughly winnowed list of postings. At the same time, they shouldn’t be so detailed that users face a category menu that’s overly long and difficult to scan. Ten to twenty categories are appropriate for structuring many topics.

On the main page for each category, highlight that category’s evergreens as well as a time line of its most recent postings.

Those of you who are doing mid-course assessments of your weblogs may want to think about some of these issues and suggestions.

Reading Blogs for Professional Development

One of the students in my planning class asked me to share the blogs and news I was reading for my own professional development. I wanted to go beyond merely sharing my blogroll, and give some thought to the process that I go through to try to distill some valuable learning from my own blog reading time. In order to do that, I needed to slow down and read blogs more mindfully during one session, watching myself and being more aware of my actual thought process as I clicked through the blogosphere. (I had lots to work with, since I’d been out of town for 4 days with only Blackberry access to the internet.)

I began my reading session after getting back with Gardner Writes, required reading for anyone with an interest in academic computing at the university level. Gardner is a multi-talented commentator who is quick to identify emerging themes and memes that others often miss. He’s also actually involved in teaching undergraduates, which brings an air of pragmatism to his posts.

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“Second Wave” Blogging

Link to: bgblogging

Barbara Ganley posted an interesting reflection on her experience with her personal blog, her writing workshop blog, and a cooperative blog by upper class students from Middlebury, Haverford and Dickinson called Blogging the World. In her posts she suggests that those of us who are using blogs in our coursework are actively preparing students for “second-wave” blogging that goes well beyond the walls of the classroom.

[these experiences have me] convinced that sustained blogging over the years, not just in the classroom, but after and outside the classroom experience, as a way to reflect on and discuss the connections between the lessons learned inside the class and the world outside our walls, is perhaps the most promising way to use blogging and other social software in a liberal arts institution.

At the heart of her post is that idea that students who are left to their own devices won’t necessarily learn the art of using these tools to “dig deep into ideas and grow communities of discourse, of knowledge and of action.” They’ll learn to keep a Live Journal diary without any help from us, but they need a more supportive learning community to practice and learn to ask more thoughtful questions, explore ideas more critically and work collaboratively at a deeper level. That support and mentoring comes from faculty members who understand the importance of those activities and who have incorporated them into our own lives and work.

The lessons from within the our classes provide the basis for “second-wave blogging” where students take their skills outside the classroom to better understand and participate in the changes in communications, technology and community that are reshaping big chunks of our world.

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