This word cloud was created by Anne Mirtschin using using wordle
A CPsquare colleague, Jeffrey Keefer is considering the pros and cons of having his college students blog. I got a lot out of being required to blog in our Online Masters in Educational Technology program at Pepperdine, so I replied to Jeffrey’s Twitter request for advice. Anne Mirtschin, another teaching Tweeter I follow, coincidentally had just tweeted her blog post on good student blogging, so I shot that over to Jeffrey. Then today while I was researching something about Ning for another colleague, I discovered this older blog post of Phil Gomes about Ning as a teaching tool. Aside from considering Ning as a blog platform, Phil addresses a central issue of whether to make the college student blog network public or private:
In terms of remaining open:
Certainly provides a real-world experience, and you won’t be too happy in PR these days unless you can handle some level of exposure.
In terms of keeping it private:
Though I did pretty darn well in my undergrad studies, I’m not entirely sure I’d have wanted my instructor requiring that my academic progression be spilled out there for all to see.
My advice to anyone considering blogs for students is to first identify the purpose of the blogging. I think the purpose of required blogging in my OMET experience was first and foremost to afford (make provision for) student reflection throughout the learning process. Our blogs were private – so that just our cadremates and profs could see them and respond to them. It was hard at first “spilling out” reflections for all my peers to see, but was a significant practice to develop. Enjoying a blog network with everyone who was in the same boat strengthened our notion of social learning (a core theme for the program), and indeed initiated me to true social networking online. However, I would not have written so freely if the blog would be discoverable later by whoever out in the world might stumble upon my fledgling attempts at public verbage.
Getting back to the instructional design purposes, if the goal is less to encourage student reflection and more about having students engage the world, or learn what blogging is all about, they might be tempted to make blogs public. I would consider the length of the term where blogging will be required, and the potential incentives or disincentives. It takes a good bit of time to generate traffic and more importantly, stresses a person to consider their public digital identity. (I’m certainly struggling with this now even as someone who wants to engage the world.) Perhaps educational technology goals could be met with a menu of blogging options on the continuum of private to public, where some students may simply engage in responding to blogs on a topic of interest or join a social network with an associated profile, while others might start their own blogs on any platform of choice.
I like Ning’s options for having a front page you can keep open to the world and private areas where members can blog just with each other. Others have used some of the big blogging platforms to do this too. Students could be encouraged to do both on a Ning network created for the class that included both options.
Finally, Brian Kelly is enriching the world at his Wordpress site describing experimental Higher Ed institutional use of blogs in the UK. It is rich because of his openness in sharing his processes.
I’m in the middle of moving a client’s Joomla website to a new host. The project reminds me of Gary Stager’s learning adventure assignments in my masters program. Professor Stager would assign one new application project each week or so, like “create a composition using Notepad Finale and share it with your learning circle.” If you didn’t know the first thing about music theory or notation, well, that just added a layer of complexity to learning a new technical application. It was hard to fail when the goal was to construct learning. As a result, I grew in my confidence to tackle new technologies using the abundant resources available among others who know a little more. Partly as a result, I work in the technical arena if the client can spare the extra time it will take me to figure out how to get the job done. Read on only if you are interested in the chronicle of moving a Joomla site to a new server. (more…)