Rowland’s Blog about e-learning matters

I have transferred some of the more recent material to my blog on my own web site.

Poll n

I have been looking around for other peoples ideaa on the relative merits of blogs and discussion boards and have come up with the follwing so far. (It is copied from my Tiddlywiki about a project on formative assessment so I hope the formatting works)

Lee Lefever had some interesting ideas about this on his blog post  “What are the Differences Between Message Boards and Weblogs?” written in 2004.

I have adapted the ideas to look at the diferences between blogs and the WebCT discussion area.

The main points for me are:

• Locus of Control and New Topics: blogs can be under the control of the individual whereas on WebCT students cannot start new topics. Formatting of blogs is also under the control of the student.
• Responses: Blog topics have comments and discussion topics have replies. Blog posts encourage comment on the post rather than the initiation of new material. That can be done with a new blog post.*
• Tools: Blogs have a number of useful tools which include: Trackback, RSS, Aggregation, Permalinks, Cross linking, Categories etc. WebCT discussions are starting to have these but they are not as flexible.
• Chronology:  Blogs are consistently arranged with the most recently posted topics at the top of the page, regardless of new comments. A discussion board, can be somewhat more confuding in it’s layout.*
• Personal Connections: Blogs can allow online community members to develop personal connections with the webloggers relatively quickly.

Lee has made some further comments in a later post   A Blog Post Says “Here It Is, Dig It” which has an elaboration of his original ideas. I got to this post from another one by Marcus ODonnel which has some further interesting ideas and some interesting comments.

Dave Warlick has some comments  on this on his 2 Cents worth blog.  Although he does not add any points that might be useful for me in this project.

We have now had two weeks using blogs on two of the modules I teach.

I am using blogs in two ways:

• on my third year undergraduate module I have set up a module blog on which I post and the students comment. Most of the comments are in response to activities or are giving feedback about the student’s experience. Given these constraints the blog seems to be working well however I wouldhave preferred a system where all the students have their own blog. At the moment this quite a job to set up as we do not have our own blog server at the university. There is also a wiki on this module which is used by groups of students to put together their ideas in response to a set of questions:

• what are the basic web design principles and how do we put them into practice?
• what is “Extensible HyperText Markup Language” (XHTML), how and why should we use it?
• how can we style web pages using cascading style sheets (CSS) and what are the reasons for doing so?
• how can we set up web pages using “extensible markup language” (XML) and should we bother?
• how can we use “Extensible Stylesheet Language” (XSL) to style web pages and what advantages and disadvantages does it have?
• what are the advantages and disadvantages of separating design from content?

On my master’s module each of the students has a blog and they also cooperate as a group on a wiki. They have to use their blogs to provide evidence that they have satisfied the learning outcomes of the module. Their claim for a grade will initially be developed on the wiki and then transfered to their own web pages. Criteria for the grades will be developed by the students in discussion with me, on the wiki, and will provide a basis for the grade claim. At the moment the blogs seem to be working well and I have had some excellent feedback from students. This may be partly because they do not have the opportunity to see one another between sessions, unlike the undergraduate students. At the students requerst we are experimenting with an online week for session 3 (Feb 14 -16). I look forward to seeing how this goes when the only communication is via web pages, blogs, the wiki and email.

I have written a second year module, which will be available next year which is about web publishing in its broader sense and will use blogs and wikis as an integral part of the module and the student’s reflections on their use will form part of the subject matter. I am hoping that the inclusion of the use of blogs and wikis as part of the learning outcomes and assessments will help to make the blogs a more dynamic force in the student’s learning.

Finally got around to looking at my syndicated blog after being snowed under with work. I thought that I would put some of interesting information I have found on the blogs.

On Josie’s blog there is an interesting post about accessibility which I hope to have more time to look at later.

A post about commenting on CogDogBlog which inspired me to comment. This is backed up by this post on Edublog Insights.

I have introduced blogging into my master’s level module on exploring web design. Students will use their blog to record their reflections about their work together with their personal responses to a number of activities. More detailed information will be put on the module wiki where it can be shared and adapted by the group.

I have been following a number of the stories about wikipedia and the idea that some people seem to have that we should get all of out information vetted by “experts” before we read it. This is clearly not workable for a variety of reasons, not least that even “experts” get it wrong.

Some of us here at Worcester are trying to empower students to make their own decisions about what data is appropriate to use and to help them develop criteria and skills to judge the worth of information for themselves. Others still have an idea of a fixed hierarchy of “information value” usually expressed as “peer reviewed journals books and then the rest”.

I have colleagues who will give assignment instructions which warn against using the Internet as a source of information, this is particularly galling for me as I teach web design and for my students the Internet is a source of excellent information.

I have known tutors who will not allow students to post their own links to information, they insist that the student sends the information to them so that it can be vetted before it is published (or not). Not only does this present a bottleneck it strongly discourages students from posting material and of course it removes any possibility of the students learning from an open debate about the worth of the material. In my experience it is difficult enough to get students to contribute material and ideas without putting additional obstacles in their way.

I have had a similar experience recently with posting a comment on a blog, when I found that it did not appear but went off to the administrator for vetting. My first response was to never comment again but on reflection I contacted the administrator and explained my attitude to the situation to them and they changed the settings to allow open comment.

While I am on the subject of student autonomy I was listening to the Go Digital blog from the BBC World Service about the 100 dollar laptop and some excellent points from a guy from Nottingham University about how the students needed to be empowered to use it for learning and how this needs to be built into the system. They then went back to the studio “expert” who seemed to miss the point entirely and talked about how a VLE could be used for lesson plans. It worries me that such “experts” might be listened to and the whole project may not fulfill its potential as a consequence of this.

Had my attention drawn to an article by Stephen Downes which gave an extensive introduction to connective knowledge. It was very long and I can’t say I understood all of it but I found it thought provoking so I am making a note here to allow me to go back and read it again. I was not entirely convinced by the detail of some of the arguments though I agreed with overall thrust. For example the “red” apple does reflect a particular wavelength of light which can be defined to be within the red part of the spectrum. Stephen is not referring to the “absolute” that an apple is red but to our perception of the “redness” of the apple. The apple still reflects the same wavelengths whether we see it as red or not. That is of course as long as it is not a “green” apple.

I have been thinking about the concept of transforming learning with technology rather than just transferring the old pedagogy onto the web and have come up with the following list so far:

I am hoping to extend/modify/explain further this list later

As I am considering using a wiki in my teaching next semseter it was useful to find, quite by accident, a discussion about using a wiki in an article called “My Brilliant Failure: Wikis In Classrooms” part of the Kairos news site which might be useful to look at further.

In the article the following is said:

“It seems clear to me now that you cannot just change the tool- you need to look at your practice as well. Being so open, a wiki does not have any inherent properties that will instantly make a knowledge-building community. It depends not only on the software configuration– for example whether certain areas are locked or whether you make templates for layout—but also on the social norms and practices around the wiki. In a classroom setting, this means the practice of the teacher, and the interactions of the students.”

Clearly, like other forms of collaborative on-line work e.g. discussions and blogs it is necessary to build a community so that students have both the technical skills and the confidence to use the wiki in a productive way. Of the two it is the confidence that is the most difficult to promote.

Thanks to James Farmer’s article in “Incorporated Subversion - The Book” which alerted me to this post and a number of others about wikis.

The article “Simple software, complex interactions?” has some really useful links to ideas about the building a social community on-line and quotes extensively from a book by Jenny Preece [Online communities: designing usability, supporting sociability Publisher: Chichester : John Wiley, Date: c2000] and also cites the paper by Jenny, Etiquette online: from nice to necessary; Communications of the ACM Vol. 47, Iss. 4 (April 2004). Can’t say I have come across either of these before.

There is also a useful translation of Preece’s on-line roles to the wiki environment

These may prove to be useful when I start to use a wiki with students. Not sure about the concept of mentors in my context as we all start at the same time. Perhaps we might modify it a bit to encourage everybody to post to the wiki. Next step is to edit the group wiki to set up a few starter pages to incorporate these ideas and others about community building.

I have been agonising over what template to use on this blog.

I want something with fairly large text and good contrast for all parts of the blog, so that is usable and accessible. Additionally I would like to use the whole width of the screen rather than squash up in the middle.

This is the closest I could get, but the text is a little on the small side.

Anybody got any ideas?

I was just randomly linking around between blogs when I came across a post on Connectivism and web2.0 on Sharon Peter’s blog. It has a direct link to a lecture by George Siemans which uses a combined slide show and voice over to present the lecture.

Sharon gives an excellent summary of the lecture on her post so I won’t repeat it here. I found the lecture very stimulating and I think it helped me to get to grips a little better with connectivism. However at the moment I can’t see that it is entirely inconsistent with social constructivism. If I understood what was said it was proposed that a learner has different perspectives on the same concept at the same time, the idea of placing themselves at different nodes in a network to view the same concept from a different angle.

As far as I am aware social constructivism allows for different perspectives on different concepts which might well contradict one another, at the same time and different perspectives on the same concept at different times. This is not quite the same thing but if you allow that the “different concepts” are really different aspects of the same concept then the two views become similar.

The other issue for me is whether understanding is a social group activity. I am happy with the notion of learning being so but less happy with understanding being other than an individual thing. Clearly I need to think about this a bit more.