Why do we blog as part of this course?  I’m hoping to achieve several things at once:

1. I want you to learn the mechanics of blogging.

To really understand what blogging can do for you as a teacher or learner, you have to get comfortable with the process, and this takes time. Readers of blogs only see the end product – the published post – and I believe it’s not until you engage in blogging yourself over a period of time that you can properly determine what value can be derived from the process itself.

First-hand experience also allows you as a teacher to make more informed choices about when and why you might want to include blogging as a part of the classroom work.

2. I hope you will experience professional reflection as a shared, collaborative process.

Blogging for a course is an unfamiliar experience for most of us. Traditionally, academic writing has been a one-way mode of communication, with the teacher as the only audience and mostly as a summative assessment – assessment of learning rather than assessment for learning.

Some things you are forced to reflect on while blogging:

• What is the effect of expanding the audience to include (potentially) everyone on the Internet?
• What happens to my writing and thinking when I receive follow-up questions to my published writing?
• How do I join a conversation and add value to it?
• Am I interested in joining a public conversation where what I say stays there for good? Am I ready to join such a conversation?
• When I write, who is my audience and what is my purpose? Am I trying to convince, question, inspire, analyze…? How do my rhetorical devices – textual or visual – support my purpose for writing?

When I go back to the classroom (in a few months, I expect), I’m fairly sure I will want to include blogging as a part of my classroom practice. The crucial question is how to use this process:

• Do I want them to create and maintain individual blogs or work in a shared class blog? This depends on the students’ age and the nature of the subject. Individual blogs are more work, but students have more of a sense of ownership and thus more incentive to invest themselves in the writing.
• What do I ask the kids to blog about? I could use it mainly as an alternative to homework and other traditional school assignments or I could give fairly loose reins to write freely… The former is a ‘safer’ choice with regards to syllabus coverage and ease of assessment, but is not as good for getting personal engagement with the topics they write about, I suspect.
• How do we maintain balance? What is a realistic expectation?

As a teacher, I feel I would need to model good practice, and would only use blogging as a long-term part of a diverse assessment strategy. At first, I would not expect students to produce particularly good work, nor do I think they would immediately gain great benefit from the process.

I guess I think of blogging a bit like jogging: the first few times you try it, it’s frustrating and hard – possibly even painful -  but if you stop there, you’ve gained very few long-term benefits from it. If, on the other hand, you start slowly and build over time, you will gradually see improvements in performance and benefits (some of which may be unintended and unexpected).

Even if I decide not to have my students write blogs, I will certainly still have them read blogs. Critical reading skills are more important than ever now that everyone with an Internet connection can publish their opinions for free with just a few clicks.

Image source: http://flickr.com/photos/sidereal/349496270/ (made available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic license).

This can lead to conversations. Conversations can grow your PLN (personal learning network).

Here’s an example: http://oomensm.wordpress.com/2009/02/13/filmism-or-how-a-blog-improved-thinking-about-film/.

This will now appear as a link in Mike’s post.

• Netvibes – for subscribing to various feeds
• GCast – where we will post all the podcast episodes (of which you’ll each contribute to make one)
• Blip.tv – where we will post the videos you make (one each) and where any tutorial videos I make will be uploaded
• the course wiki on wetpaint – where we will do notes for each session and where you can find information and post practical questions in the forum
• and finally the wordpress blogs, where you will do all the reflection pieces and comment on each others’ blogs

If you’ve used one or more of the tools before, that makes it a bit easier, but if not, it’s hard to keep them apart at first.

Next time, we’ll be talking about Web 2.0 and more about blogging. That will give you time to digest these ideas – what is a blog, what is a wiki, how do they differ, and perhaps more importantly right now, how are we going to be using them for this course?

I moved back the reading I’d initially set for Friday, so there are no reading assignments or anything else to do until Feb. 24 – many of you are still doing another course, and there’s no need to go overboard.

It would be useful to log into your blog just to mess about with it, though, so at least some of what we did today will stick. In the meantime, I’ll add some tutorial videos on how to do some of the common tasks in wordpress.

Also, if you didn’t yet fill out your participant profile, please do that.

Thanks!

I had the whole course set up in a Ning site, but then realized quite late in the day that Wetpaint is just too awesome, so I’ve migrated the whole thing to Wetpaint. That is, I’ve created the whole site again, with a somewhat different structure right from scratch…

Why? Well, besides the total awesomeness of Wetpaint, I have a feeling that working in a wiki site for two months will teach you more about setting up wikis than using a Ning site would teach you about Ning management. Wetpaint is very flexible and just seems to allow for a bit more customization than a Ning site.

I still have a few things to add before it’s ready for next Monday, though, so now it’s back to work!

I’ve set up a wiki site to serve as the hub for the course, and then we’ll use blogs (one per participant), a Gcast podcast channel, TeacherTube for videos, SlideShare for presentations and Netvibes to aggregate all the content. I’ll also put RSS feeds on the wiki site for all the content created, and we’ll have discussion forums for the kinds of questions and answers people don’t feel ready to publish on their blogs.

I’m still making adjustments to the course plans and the site, but hopefully I’ll stop being so compulsive soon and just have fun with the course