Education Building

Below are links to and notes on three interesting recent research articleson blogs in education:

1. An empirically grounded framework to guide blogging in higher education

Kerewalla, Minocha, Kirkup and Canole (2008) identify four factors that students consider when participating in a course blogging assignment. These factors are:

• Audience: What audience (if any) are contributors addressing?
• Community: To what extent are contributors working together to achieve common goals or objectives?
• Comments: What kind of feedback (if any) should readers offer contributors on their posts? Why should reader and contributors engage in discussion about a post?
• Presentation: What form should a post take? What register and voice should contributors use? What writing rules should contributors obey?

This article is worth reading because the authors present  a useful model for planning blog-based learning activities. The model includes useful questions for instructors to reflect on in the planning process and for students to consider when they contribute to a course blog.  There are two clear take-home messages for instructors:

• craft a clear rationale for blogging activities and explain the benefits for the students
• avoid overburdening contributors with a lot of guidelines and restrictions – use questions to create opportunities for reflection instead.

2. Blogs and Wikis as Instructional Tools: A Social Software Adaptation of Just-in-Time Teaching

Higdon and Topaz (2009) describe  how they use student blogs and a wiki to to practice just-in-time teaching. In a nutshell, students blog before class about what they don’t understand about the course material, and the instructor tailor. This technique complements active learning strategies in lectures.

3. Dream Bloggers Invent the University

Tougaw (2009) reflects on the relationship between blogging and academic writing. The article is interesting because it explores the issues of voice and inquiry and the uses of having students do informal writing in formal educational contexts.  Those teaching academic writing or considering using blogs in a W course  will find this a rich resource.

Flickr creative commons image credits: arnoKath, Felix42 contra la censura, jurvetson, AEngineer

To help Jason Toal and David Rubeli plan the Educational Technology Series workshop on Blogs in Education, we invite registered participants to comment below and tell us some details  about:

• your field of study or area of expertise
• a course your teach or TA (level, size, students) – if applicable
• your familiarity with the Internet
• why you are interested in blogs
• what you would like to get out of the workshop

You must be logged in to comment. To log in:

• Click the link under Post a Reply, OR
• Click the log in link on the bottom of the sidebar on the right.

I am trying to catch up on my blog reading (over 500 unread postings in Google Reader), and as a result, I have a few links that I’ve starred, am planning to incorporate into a project, or just plain old resonated with me.

Writer as Athlete over at Profhacker.com compares the writer to the athlete. You can (and I will) also extend this to teachers. Advice like plan ahead, be resilient to “failure” and find your focus are all ideas worth remembering. It seems like everyone is talking about how we’ve got too much to do, so here is a link to the Academic Life and the Get Things Done approach.

Did you know that our neighbors at BCIT have a blog? They’ve linked to an article that suggests that learning styles might not be a big determining factor in teaching.

And then FacultyFocus had a nice posting on making peer assessment actually a working idea, not just a good idea.

This is really a two-part posting. I’ve recently discovered the blog Prof Hacker, and it’s got all sort of tips and hints to working in the post secondary environment. The posts range from classroom management, technologies and more.Put it in your RSS feed reader. Now!

This particular post is about the Creately diagramming software. The post muses on the how this software replaces others and how she’ll implement it in the classroom. I’m a big fan on using mind mapping or diagrams to explain or uncover complex ideas and always happy to see opportunities to promote this learning approach.

If you aren’t convinced on the merits of information visualization, try picking up a book by Edward Tufte. It’s time well spent.

Awhile back, Richard Smith demoed his use of DimDim for Teaching. I have been trying to track down his recording of it as it makes a great example of how this broadcast technology can enhance the classroom experience for students.

I usually “stream” my lectures to the Internet while I am teaching. Today I’ll be doing a demo up at SFU to show how I am doing that these days.

post

See the recording of his presentation here.

We have been using DImDim on another project in the LIDC, and capitalizing on its easy integration with Moodle. You can view the development site here. I’m not sure how it all works under the hood, (there is a handy integration guide available for those wishing to try it out) Basically, it lets you create a DimDim meeting as an activity in a course. It handles placement in the calendar and upcoming events blocks, and porvides an interface form launching the meeting right from your moodle course page. Im not sure it is a total replacement for the universities eLive services, but for free, its pretty useful.