The LTD Project Blog

Not long ago, Heather Ross asked about institutional social networking policies, and also about institutional access to third-party sites educators use.

What’s Your Institution’s / School’s Social Networking Policy (2009.08.17)

Though I tried commenting on that post, I got error messages twice, and then fedback to this effect, “Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!” Since I’m unsure what got through, here goes again.

I thought Heather might be interested in an encapsulated gem I found the other day, and have described like this in Diigo:

Jenna McWilliams’ post frames and follows on from Steve Taffee’s post comprising Proposed Guidelines for Use of Social Networks by School Faculty and Staff (Blogg-Ed Indetermination, Social Networking Guidelines for School Employees, 2009.02.12). Her follow-ons focus “On ‘Misrepresentation’” and “On Course Use of Social Networking.”

on social networking guidelines … (2009.06.02)

The stimulus for Jenna’s post (Taffee, 2009.02.12) points further to a Facebook source, Faculty Ethics on Facebook, a group to which Taffee belongs.

Thanks to all of you who’ve pitched in by responding to the Edublogs themes survey already. On the previous post (LTD Project Blog, Which themes…, 2009.01.30), the Google form now appears functional. If it goes out of whack (again), the link to the form still works.

Responses are beginning to begin to trickle in (see: spreadsheet display, below). Please let your Edublogging associates know I’d like to hear about their themes, too.

There seems to be a difference of opinion out there in the blogosphere. For instance, Matt asserted “default pages will have comments enabled on them” (WordPress.com, Comments on pages, 2006.09.11).

However, Blogosquare asserted, more recently than Matt (above), “Most [WordPress] themes don’t come with comments on pages,” and then explains how “…to check whether yours come with that feature:

• [L]ogin to your Wordpress admin section > Manage > Pages >[;]
• Click Edit under any page and at your right hand side among the page’s options, at the Discussion box, [and] check [the] Allow Comments and Allow Pings checkbox[es].
• Save the page[,] and get to that page on your blog.
• There, see whether the comment’s form is being displayed.”

(Blogosquare, Things you should know…, 2007.06.29)

What matters to me is whether the Edublogs themes students choose for individual blogs used for classwork allow comments on their pages. When they write about themselves, and start proto-portfolio pages, comments sure could come in handy.

A couple months ago, drmike, Volunteer Support Guru on the Edublogs Forums, suggested getting together a list (Comments on Pages, c. 2008.10.?? [no readable date]). However, checking a hundred or more available themes (The Edublogger, The 100 Edublogs Themes…, 2008.07.17) is a chore more than anyone wants to take on single-handed.

The shocking appearance of Ads by Google during in the interim seemed more likely to precipitate thoughts of moving class and student blogs elsewhere than it was to inspiring volunteer work. Nevertheless, I’m giving it a go, by calling for quick responses on a Google form.

Your theme title, plus three Yes/No clicks is all it takes. Thank you in advance for your cooperation. If the form doesn’t appear here, please try the link below

Loading…

(embedded form, above)

Does your Edublog theme allow comments on pages? (link to form)

Cheers, PB

In a Blended Learning and Instruction discussion of Social Networks, Marielle expresses belief in common and continuing desires to maintain individual spaces for online postings, and in increasing ease of cross-posting and cross-referencing from and to multiple venues. In the same post, she points out risks related to diversification of networks and multiplication of personal writing venues (blogs) diluting “critical mass that is key to their success” (Comment 18741, 2008.07.24, JST).

While Marielle recognizes strengths of networking technology that enable people with common interests to form networks, if not communities, easily and quickly; she also points out amplifications and caveats to those bent on rapid diversification of networking sites, and similar migrations from one to the next:

With the viral spread of online networks, we must take care not to dilute them so much (by rapidly migrating to new ones) that they lose their power, which derives from the quantity and quality of their membership. With the proliferation of blogs, we must take care not to get lost in a plethora of solipsistic silos, speaking without listening, reinventing rather than building upon each other’s ideas and deepening the collective dialogue.

(mpal3, So Many Nodes, Not Enough Reciprocity (Yet), 2008.07.03)

At present, lacking (or simply ignoring) great automaticity in propagating connections from one blog or network to the next, it remains a matter of choice where to establish or maintain a toehold on connected writing. For me, the choice this morning was easier done than said, or written about. Anyway, here goes – a short story long:

I’d followed Marielle’s link from Blended Learning to her blog (Authorship 2.0), previewed her post about reciprocity, and decided on the spot to bookmark it in Diigo, highlighting the passage that I’ve quoted above, sharing it with a Diigo branch of the Learning with Computers community, and sending it to a list of friends weblogging in Kumamoto. When I finished bookmarking, commenting on, and description of the post that I’d flagged, the description had grown to such an extent that it seemed almost more suited for blog commentary.

There I was, in Edublogs, ready to leave a comment for Marielle, when it dawned on me that I didn’t recall, immediately, what in a flurry of early morning activity had lead me there. Once I pasted the overflow from the Diigo bookmark description into an Edublog comment window, with no, “Hi, I found this interesting post on your blog through…” (no thanks to hot de-caf. coffee on a sweltering morning before the air-conditioning kicks in), I noticed how impersonal what I’d originally written for a bookmark description sounded as a stand-alone comment.

That inkling led to a quick poke about the Authorship blog to see who had written the post So Many Nodes… (above). However, finding little more than mpal3 on edublogs (and Bmused on del.icio.us) there-abouts; I decided that, rather than leave my names, email address, and an impersonal comment on an unknown author’s blog (if knowing an author requires knowing her name), it would be easier to dump the description I’d clipped from Diigo into a new, full-featured blog entry here, then retrace my steps backwards through multiple browsers, tabs, and drop-down histories, in order to suss out what connections I could.

In short, I got lost, and wrote my way back. The remainder of the coffee is chilling, the air-conditioning is working now; I’m heating the world, and writing solipsistically. What else is new? I’ve rediscovered, in a very personal way, what so many nodes mean. I surmise that initial connections in or via writing, whether in the head or on the web, are necessarily loose, and that virtual connectedness is just that – virtual.

As I sat in the cabin darkness, feasting on its deliciousness, and staring dubiously at the Cmap representation I’d included in the previous post, Another Edublog… (2008.05.20); it dawned on me: “Eh, mate! You’re going on six blogs (and um-teen other online identities)!” Yet I’ve long been in a virtual sense, if I may tweak a line from a favorite children’s story by Lynly Dodd, “all [pabey] and [pboney] like Blitzer Maloney” [add page ref. about here].

Having tired of grappling with technological demons, real or imagined, yet not of deliberation and reflection in writing; I’ve opened the locker door, and tossed moldy vestiges of identity out to air on the deck. Here is a heap that has come to light:

An earthling: “An educator and a learner, a parent and a child, a colleague and a friend” (in elgg, c. 2006); “I teach computer skills, cultur…[-al appreciation], listening, speaking, reading and writing, and promote both [language] learners’ and teachers’ development” (in Blogger, c. 2007), as an author, a blogger, and a collaborator, aka: pab, pabeaufait….

([my] Your Profile, 2008.05.29)

Tags: blogging, identities, online, stories

… 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.”

This is a quick-and-dirty reaction (ultimately to be revised) of a recent Educause article suggesting technological gaps between learners and educators, analyzing challenges that educators might face, and proposing strategies for responding to such challenges and bridging said gaps. It begins with a large chunk of food for thought from the source, which ploddingly challenged readership with pdf representation through page and column formats:

… [M]any faculty members today have become so inundated with digital communications from students that it is not unusual for communication protocols and limitations to be specified in course syllabi. Most faculty members have home access to campus resources and use a course management system. But have faculty embraced and utilized technology to the same extent as students? Most evidence, though limited, indicates that this is not the case.

Students live in a separate reality from faculty members, who are typically not motivated or rewarded by institutional incentives to change their practice. However, as higher education institutions struggle with limited budgets to support faculty and to move courses online, technology seems to change daily. Given the demands of teaching, service, and (for most) research, faculty are now expected to embrace learning technologies along with everything else, challenging the institution to help them make sense of what works and how to work it.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 30)

Granted, students may have at their ears and fingertips a host of protocols and practices for high-speed communication. However, what research suggests that they are using it, easily, or could or would want to, for higher educational purposes? For example, while getting by acquiring and compiling information for personal use may be quick and easy, synthesizing it and putting it to problem-solving or conflict-resolving purposes in environmental or social domains remain challenges that only attitude, skill and value development, not tooling up, can address.

Nevertheless, McGee and Diaz (2007) suggest a host of challenges that educators might face in order to get on the same wave-length as learners – if ever they’d want to: for starters, the over-abundance of digital tools and paucity of models for effective applications of digital communication technology in education. Other challenges include:

• disintegration (if not incompatibility) of tools;
• diversity of learners’ abilities, expectations and needs;
• instability, overly rapid or slow evolution of ed-tech infrastructures; &
• discontinuity of financial and technological support.

In spite of those challenges, McGee and Diaz contend that Web 2.0 tools “hold the most promise because they are strictly Web-based and typically free, support collaboration and interaction, and are responsive to the user” (p. 31). Their typology of applications ranges from communicative to interactive, with stops at collaborative, documentative [sic] and generative. However, blogs, virtual communities of practice, and virtual learning worlds are the only “tools” listed in more than one category along their alphabetical way (Table 1, p. 32).

All in all, it seems that integration and sustainability of educational technology is likely to occur only within adaptive communities or across virtual worlds, rather than as consequences of institutional-level tool evaluations, adoptions, training and subsequent dependencies. Yet McGee and Diaz suggest that the onus is on “institutions and faculty members” to sort this all out and devote necessary resources to it:

Given that higher education finally has some technologies actually designed for teaching and learning, institutions and faculty members alike need to determine the value of these tools and how they can best support learning. It is vital that the institution provide services and resources while also supporting the range of faculty members’ skill, expertise, capability, interest, and motivation.

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, pp. 32-33)

As means to discover what’s at issue, they suggest surveys, focus groups, observations, document analyses, more surveys, interviews, software tracking, self-reporting and shadowing. That’s calling for a whack of resource commitments already, and the process of “matching pedagogical value with [theoretically and experientially grounded] teaching and learning behaviours” (p. 36) is just beginning – then throw in all the variables for technological adoption, spread and support! What large, cash-strapped research university diverts such considerable resources to sweeping introspection?

(Cutting to the chase, if I may, just to get this post out there in a blogosphere and walk home before dark, …. Oops, too late!)

In spite of recognizing learner and educator diversity, McGee & Diaz suggest values of facility in “using technology consistently across programs” (p. 36). Hmm, what next? Standardization across institutions surely would make tools easier and cheaper to acquire, and support services easier to provide, too, wouldn’t it?

If viewed in bright light, their article seems to wind down with a flurry of platitudes regarding technology selection and implementation: Educator, know thyself, those you teach, and what challenges you; keep the ends in the fore; gather information that serves as evidence for what you do, or want to; take on or assign only doable tasks, and support those who have to achieve them.

It might also be possible to interpret McGee and Diaz’s technology selection strategies from a technology-neutral or negatively biased position, for they conclude that tech-savvy, if not technophiliac, educators are beginning to ask appropriate questions, although perhaps not in the right order (rearranged for this blog post):

• Do emerging and innovative technologies actually result in an improved educational model [or improved educational models]?
• How do these technologies map to instructional problems?
• Which technologies actually improve learning?
• How are these technologies implemented and sustained?

(McGee & Diaz, 2007, p. 38)

Reference

McGee, Patricia; & Diaz, Monica. (2007). Educause Review (September/October), p. 30. Retrieved September 14, 2007, from www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0751.pdf

Blogged with Flock

Tags: tech-savvy, web 2.0, education, technology, adoption, support, digital, communication, CMC, research

In a recent Green Room podcast, Dan Balzar makes a provocative statement that has inspired me to listen to it again more carefully than as music in the background. As it turns out, he says, “You can’t cobble together a bunch of little pieces, and that makes a good course” (Seven Revelations about e-Learning, The Green Room, Episode 28 [that's episode 28, regardless of the "38" in the URL], July 16, 2007)….

Now I’ve done, gone and listened again to find that Dan, talking about point number five – namely: how instructional elements can “get lost in translation” from one educational context to another, gives an example of “learning objects.” These, he concludes, “have not been as popular as we thought they’d be.”

Well, I’ve often considered the term “learning objects” an oxymoron, and never thought they’d be popular for adult learners, though perhaps they would be as work-saving devices for educators too busy to learn to craft, compose and contextualize their own educational materials. After all, what can an object learn, anyway – or, more accurately perhaps, what educational cobbling roles might fungible digital parts suit?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Attribute to “pab’s potpourri”.

In addition to a first batch of nine lessons learned through seven years of blogging (Porter, 2007a), Joshua has summed up nine more lessons for bloggers (2007b). I’ve collected and recast them here because they resonate with what I’ve been feeling, reading and wondering recently about blogging.

Getting over initial fears of publishing your thoughts is part of the blogging process. This is a challenge for many if not most would-be bloggers. You can get over, around or through it simply by blogging.

Saying your say is important, whether you say it right the first time or not. Thinking aloud in beta is part of the process; just keep typing. Posting what you’ve written is essential. As Joshua suggests: “When in doubt, post.” You’re a blog owner, so you can always change your posts, continue to refine them, or remove them later. Fine-tuning posts with comments is a possibility (Porter, 2007a). However, I prefer revising the posts themselves.

Sticking to your passion(-s) will enable you to inspire not only your readers, but yourself. It will help you decide what to write about, and feel strong enough about to see it through. You should be writing from the gut or heart. So rather than worrying about grammatical correctness, you should concentrate on making your ideas easy to understand.

Creating a “greatest hits” collection, or showcase module, and featuring it on every page will remind readers of where you’ve been and what you’ve done (Porter, 2007a). It will also help you remember that people are reading what you’ve written, and that you have written something you’re proud of. This is an idea I plan to adopt and share with students as well.

Nevertheless, is important to take your time writing because each post can pay forward as well as pay back. Give each post and each concept that you embrace a meaningful, memorable name. Build on posts of interest to you and others. Continue to revise good stuff to make it better; you never know who may find it several years down the road.

Joshua suggests summarizing comments and writing your own reflections in follow-ups, linking to, but not quoting yourself. If you’ve got a hot idea that deserves reiteration, refer to it by name and paraphrase it; you most certainly can find a better, more economical way to say it again than quoting.

It is productive to own up to your mistakes. If someone points out a mistake that you’ve made, in thinking or expression, agree that you made it and carry on with what you actually meant. Take other disputes off-line promptly. If criticism becomes offensive, personal or tangential to the focus of your writing, don’t haggle about it on your blog or in counter comments. You may wish to try writing a polite email response instead.

Finally, it is important remember that blogs are conversational. Your posts should sound as if you’re speaking, and you can use your voice to help make others’ perhaps softer, less familiar voices heard by cross-linking, creating broader audiences and promoting higher expectations of readership (Porter 2007b).

References

Porter, Joshua (2007a). Nine lessons for would-be bloggers. Retrieved August 7, 2007, from http://bokardo.com/archives/9-lessons-for-would-be-bloggers/

Porter, Joshua (2007b). Nine more lessons for would-be bloggers. Retrieved August 7, 2007, from http://bokardo.com/archives/9-more-lessons-for-would-be-bloggers/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Attribute to “pab’s potpourri”.

This post, I’m labeling “b4b” because when I announced this blog in the Blogging for Beginners (B4B): Links: Participant’s Blogs list, I characterized it as an experiment in labeling. While this experiment has surpassed the duration of the B4B workshop by a week or so, I am anxious to flag and share the results.

Just as the blogroll that I assembled had grown too long, so too had the list of labels (I’ll work on the blogroll later). In the past few days, I have combined labels and re-affixed the combined labels to blog posts which bore original, spontaneously derived labels. What follow are a few memorable examples of the past few days’ work (ABC…). The left-most items are current labels derived from items to the right:

• AudioPodcastsVideo: Audio/Video

• This concatenation derives from recent wiki reorganization which reflects the intersection of audio files, blogs, podcasts and videos.

• BloggingCommentary: Blog/Comment

• CognitionReflection: Meta-cognition and Reflection

I’ve decided to use CamelCase, instead of slash marks, and to spell items out rather than acronym-ize them (ExtensiveReading rather than ER, on another blog). I’ve also decided to use plural forms of countable nouns: tools and wikis, rather than tool and wiki (same pluralization for del.icio.us bookmarks, when I get around to it).

In Camino, the Mac browser that I prefer, revisiting and editing posts and labels was easy because I could click on a label. Then the pencil icon on each post with labels that I wished to edit offered one-click access to the posts and their labels. For example, I could select a label like “GlobalIssue” and immediately revise each post so labelled to “GlobalIssues.”

However, in Firefox for Windows, I have been unable to display the editing icon (pencil) on any post, in spite of toggling off and on the settings for easy editing (Blogger: Dashboard: Settings: Basic: Show Quick Editing on your Blog? Yes). Clicking on a label concatenated target posts. Yet I’ve had to use the Dashboard: Edit Posts view, and repeatedly scroll down through the list of posts to visually search for labels to redefine.

Once I got to the end of the first 25 posts or so displayed, I had to scroll down and then select Older Posts, before continuing to scan for labels to redefine. Scrolling down and then reselecting Older Posts was necessary after every label update.

How did Neil Young put it in his song, “Piece of…?”

I’d better stop now, before this report and reflection turns into a rant.