The LTD Project Blog

Thanks to prodding from Carla in comments on the previous post (EduBlogs Insights: More True than Ever), I’ve postponed lunch to “put something up here for an appetizer” (ltdproject, February 20th, 2008 at 11:50 am [JST]).

The mind-map represented in the image below is a visualization in progress to reflect upon tools and venues supporting a growing community of webloggers called WinK, an acronym for Weblogging in Kumamoto, the brain-child of two colleagues with whom I group blog privately in Vox.

The Pageflakes nodes (among RSS aggregators in the image, below), inaccurate and incomplete as they may be, represent recent developments inspired by impeccable models in the Blogging for Educators workshop (wiki & Pageflakes).

For the continuing inspiration that the TESOL Electronic Village Online workshop coordinators, facilitators, and other participants provide, I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere thanks: Thank you all!

This mind-map (image only) captures many if not most of the major constituent elements of WinK at this point in time (between academic years 2007-08, and 2008-09). Please note that it is neither complete in details or interconnections, nor completely accurate in some of the details it represents.

(PB [aka ltdproject], description of WinK image posted on a Vox blog,

for discussion in the private WinK Core Group, 2008.02.20).

… Blogging has helped me view each of my students as constructors of knowledge who need frequent opportunities to be involved in the process of creating meaning. Blogs can be short, quick writes that give them the practice they need to learn from putting their thoughts down and then engaging in the dialogue about the process, both online and in the classroom….

Davis, EduBlogs Insights,
Blogs and Pedagogy, 2006.05.31

Now that I’ve spent a year with students in a blended learning environment for whom blogging was the primary course activity, I must say that those choice words from a Blogging for Educators workshop reading ring more true than ever.

One activity that I will continue to assign next year will be quick-writes at the beginning of face-to-face class meetings in order to encourage students to develop fluency in written thought production. This activity will continue to challenge them not only cognitively, but also linguistically - as they write in a language other than their vernacular, and typographically - because they may be better at text input with a thumb or two on cellphone keypads than than they are on keyboards with four fingers and two [one or both] thumbs.

In order to engage them further, in dialogues about the process of writing in English as an additional language, I am seeking to adopt and adapt or develop activities that both promote and facilitate reflective, meta-cognitive and interpersonal writing. I’ll be looking in particular for activities like that as I view cristinacost’s November 2007 SlideShare, “Practically Speaking: A ‘How To’ Approach and Practical Examples on Blogging in the EFL Classroom.”

In The Technology of Reading and Writing…: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom, Parry suggests need for a reliable means of facilitating peer-student readership, one that guides students beyond clicking and scanning of classmates’ blogs, beyond simply looking up and hitching up with one’s friends and favorites, and that propels them towards “reading the others’ work critically and providing constructive contributions” (Why it Matters for Student Writing, ¶ 3). If students receive RSS feeds providing headlines and synopses of posts from all peers’ blogs, Parry argues, students can scan every post and determine for themselves which they ought to read more closely.

In writing classes I’ve taught, I’ve observed how students at liberty to do so will gravitate to their friends and favorites, with whom they may even sit in class, and on whose blogs they may willingly sustain exchanges beyond one-off comments at assigned intervals. Although active feeds which conceal author’s names may encourage students to explore posts on blogs other than those of their best buddies, they will still need interest, motivation, and purpose to carry them beyond scanning attractive posts, commenting haphazardly, and then nipping back to links, feeds, and channels already familiar and favorable to them. I still wonder to what extent student peers can stimulate and satisfy each others’ intellectual curiosity through obligatory online interactions.

Parry suggests also that we use RSS feeds to channel comments as well as synopsize posts. Indeed we can, without so much difficulty that students cannot do so on their own blogs. For a relatively simple recipe for doing so on Blogger blogs, please see:

Recent Comment Feed on Your Blog
(pab’s potpourri, February 1, 2008).