The LTD Project Blog

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.

In comments on my draft blog plan, Claudia Ceraso inquires about students’ cross-blog reading and commentary, homework, RSS feeds, and the relationship between course blog and wiki. I’d like to respond between the lines of her inquiry (excerpts in italics, below):

• I understand from your post that drafting may be done at home, blogging will be done at the school. How about the reading of each other’s posts and comments? Will that be homework? Will you be encouraging students to use RSS feeds?

That is correct, students will probably do a large part of their blogging in class – especially those without access from home. A number of additional computer laboratories will go online by next fall, so opportunities to do homework in the lab’s will multiply. Another option, perhaps better suited to students’ lifestyles than mine, is that of blogging from ubiquitous mobile phones. Those who wish to do that can send pictures and blog stubs from almost anywhere.

I consider reading and commenting on one another’s blogs part of blogging, hence my rather optimistic projections of three to five student posts per week. Were they to devote their time to generating RSS feeds, I’m afraid that they would do much less communicative writing than they need to. English majors with the computer skills to generate feeds already may be few and far between.

• Does the wiki already exist? How do the course wiki and blog relate to each other?

Yes, the wiki exists – just barely (it’s not open to the public). I’m setting up a PmWiki and find it much slower going than Wikispaces, especially while B4B continues. To describe the relationship between planned course blog and counterpart wiki in few words is a challenge.

Suffice it to say for the moment (almost 12 hours into a constant keyboarding day) that I expect the two parts to be closely interconnected (for example: blog feeds on the wiki): the wiki to contain more mutable, less time-sensitive material than the blog (for example: grammar references); and the blog to serve not only as a model for learning bloggers, but also as a gateway to a local blogging community (as will the wiki).

• I am particularly interested in these questions because I am thinking about my own blog plans adjustments for 2007.

• I am adding a wiki to my FCE blog for students as from next April, so I hope you keep posting about how your project develops and the students’ response to it.

(Fri Feb 23, 03:25:00 PM JST)

I had visited and bookmarked Claudia’s FCE wiki not long before I found her comments on my draft blog plan. I’m looking forward both to returning for a closer look at the wikispaces she has started, and continuing to peruse her ELT Notes blog, which has been in my blogroll almost as long as any other but B4B!

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

Attribute to “pab’s potpourri”.

The points this plans addresses derive from a Blogging for Beginners (B4B) workshop task on the B4B pbwiki (Task 1 – Looking ahead – The Challenges of blog integration into our teaching). I’m posting the plan here so I can continue to develop it at my leisure (hah!) over the next week or so; I welcome your suggestions via comments.

• BLOG NAME: The name should match the course wiki name, so there’s hardly any doubt that it will be … Writing Studio Blog.

• BLOG HOST: The host should be free, and match the blog type that students will be using – again, there’s little doubt that it’ll be Blogger blogging for them.

• Note: This is a teachers’ group decision, though I almost prefer Edublogging. Radical changes in Blogger during the next week or so could influence this decision.

• BLOG SAFETY: I will require word verification, but only retroactively moderate comments from students. By retroactively, I mean I will assert administrative privilege to delete unwanted or no longer pertinent comments. I will strongly urge students to use word verification on their blogs as well. Regarding privacy, I note that an example student blog that I’ve just retrieved (see: Evaluation, below) is publicly accessible without going through university or community sites. The public nature of such blogs may influence what students post as well as who reads them.

• OWNER[S]: I’ll launch a blog for the two classes that I teach across town starting in April, and list it for other teachers’ and their students’ reference. Other teachers and I will help students launch their own blogs. So students, too, will be blog owners.

• ADMINISTRATOR(S): This particular plan is for but one small part of a collegial and community-based blogging endeavor. As I suggest regarding the blog name (above), another small part will be a corresponding wiki. The planned blog and budding PmWiki will inform not only classes taught concurrently but in all likelihood successive cohorts, just as preceding cohorts, blogs, wikis and web pages have already done. The wiki that I administrate is provided as a courtesy of the host institution. I will join two teachers already collaborating on blogger community building, as I have joined them in writing about online educational endeavors. One of the other teachers currently exerts administrative privileges over the community website.

• WHEN WILL THE BLOG BE KEPT ACTIVE? I expect to start the planned blog within a week or so after posting this plan for peer review and announcing it in the B4B workshop blog. I will keep it active for the duration of the coming academic year (April – March).

• TOPIC[S]: The topics for the planned blog will most likely be varied. However, I expect the majority of posts to focus on:

• writing coursework and assignment details,
• language learning activities and strategies,
• extensive reading and learner blogging, &
• to the extent feasible, learned-centered blog assessment (see: Evaluation, below).

• WHO WILL POST? – On the planned teacher’s blog, though students, peers and conceivably other interested parties may comment; only the teacher is likely to originate blog posts. Students will maintain their own blogs and comment on those of their peers.

• WHERE WILL AUTHORS POST FROM? Most student posts and comments will probably originate from on-campus computer laboratories. I expect to post to the planned teacher’s blog mostly from my office before and after laboratory classes.

• Wow, this planification thing is working!

• I’ve just realized that where and when students actually do what proportions of their writing ought to become research questions for collaborating teachers.

• HOW OFTEN WILL AUTHORS POST? – Offhand, I’ll say three to five times a week, both for me on the planned teacher’s blog, and for students on their individual blogs. Students should be able to create two posts, drafts at least, during class time in a computer lab. (90 minutes per week) – especially if they come prepared with outlines, notes and pre-located references to use for in-class writing.

• WHY WILL AUTHORS POST? The course syllabus requires individual student blogging for a variety of purposes including: reflection upon extensive reading and viewing activities, sharing of learning and other informative resources, posting major assignments for peer review, and commenting on others’ blogs. As have predecessors, I will encourage and model unfettered expression in optional types of blog posts, of both filtering and journaling varieties.

• EVALUATION:
  

• Evaluation of students blogging endeavors will continue to build upon a framework of weblog assessment indices (WAIs). A quick Google search (keywords: Kumamoto, WAI, weblog, assessment, index) top-lines an example from mid-term, second semester, last year (I LOVE SOCCER: WAI: the weblog assessment index;
  November 28, 2006).
• Student blog authors will be EFL learners, so I hesitate to categorize anything that they write while learning English as “mistakes.” Instead, I prefer to think of what they say and write as approximations of communication in the target language. As time allows, in class and out – without savaging learners’ writing spaces, I expect that we’ll negotiate both meanings and forms of their approximations, in order to achieve or repair communication with target audiences.
• I intend to collect specimens to illustrate need for common repairs, and to model and suggest repair strategies.

• I may rant in class and online about repetitive oversights or omissions that I find common in drafts, essays, blog posts or comments.
• Students who continue to make such oversights or omissions may feel like they have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire!

• TARGET AUDIENCE[S]: The students will be writing to an audience including:

• themselves – to mediate and observe their own linguistic development;
• their peers: class mates, cohorts, successors – as near-peer role models and cross-commentators within an intermural community of bloggers including other universities; and,
• should students decide to make their blogs readily accessible outside the community – also to other interested parties around our blogosphere.

• Note: I’ll share this B4B advice with students: “Thinking of what kind of connection your readers may have should be important when determining what kind of content you’ll include (remember the more you embed, the harder it is for people on a slow connection to get access to your blog).”

• ADVERTISING: Rather than “advertising,” which has strong commercial connotations, I’d rather use the word, promotion. Community organizers will promote students blogs with RSS feeds in instructors’ blogs or wikis and on community web pages. I will confer with the organizers soon, and suggest an announcement of the community on Dekita.

• WIDGETS: As a minimum, on the planned teacher’s blog, I plan to include:

• a Creative Commons license;
• labels keying into types of posts and specific assignments;
• links to a course wiki and community website;
• reference tools: a calendar and a dictionary; &
• some sort of a logo.

The following is a comment that I’m cross-posting from the B4B Blog entry on Week 4 – Best Blogging Practices (task 2). It reflects in part upon another less recent entry in Edublog Insights than I wrote about in a previous entry in pab’s potpourri.

Were I to be so bold as to assert knowledge of best bloggin’ practices, I’d be stretching beyond my ken. Nevertheless, there are a couple things that sound good a mere 7-8 months into personal blogging.

First, I would like to reflect and perhaps re-spin Linda’s suggestion… regarding how to treat learners’ blogs. That seems to imply our treating their blogs with the utmost respect, as connected, interested and motivated learners, ourselves, who are focusing on emerging ideas rather than unrefined forms.

Second, since a number of preceding comments have focused on the second of the readings found on the B4B wiki [Kathy Sierra, January 3, 2006; Creating Passionate Users: Crash course in learning theory], I’d like to bounce back to a point that immediately and memorably caught my attention in the first, by Ann Davis, a week or so ago when I had a moment to read it (and before I moved on to blog another of Ann’s interesting posts):

Giving students a choice in making their own connections about their learning on blogs paves the way for blogs to be constructivist tools for learning. These attributes are compelling and powerful motivators that help us shape the pedagogy.

What Ann says about pedagogy still seems to resonate with my spin on Linda’s suggestion (above), and sounds even more suited to educational blogging with adult learners – andragogy….

Caught some good vibes reading into Edublog Insights, where Anne Davis reprises “Ellin Oliver Keene’s keynote at the TRLD conference.” That’s: Technology, Reading and Learning Diversity; I gather.

Continuing to sum up Ellin’s presentation, Anne notes several strategies for enabling learners to “dwell in ideas… in the classroom”, namely:

• Clearing time for learners “to listen to themselves think and consider subtleties”;
• Modeling “how proficient readers frequently re-read and re-think portions of text… to explore [ideas] more deeply”; &
• Teaching “about meta-cognition – thinking about one’s own thinking – and the seven most common meta-cognitive strategies.”

I wonder whether a minimum of 10-15 minutes individual, reading-related blogging per day might help fill the bill. That is, to implement some of the seven strategies that Anne recap’s:

1. Connecting the known to the new;
2. Determining importance, learning the essence of text;
3. Questioning, delving deeper into meaning;
4. Using sensory images to enhance comprehension;
5. Inferring, finding the intersection of meaning;
6. Synthesizing, discovering the contour and substance of meaning;
7. Solving reading problems Independently [capitalization in original], empowering children to move from problem to resolution.

Those metacognitive strategies go, I suppose, for adults as well as children.

Whilst announcing a wonderful interview on her blog, MaryH suggests that she’ll try podcasting interviews “in the future” (B4B Message 1503). In response, Gladys points out a recording tool – blog sharing link-up (Podomatic: Blogger) that used to work for her, yet expresses a preference for “text in blogs” (B4B Message 1534, PS).

Elsewhere on the B4B list (forgive me, please, for relying here upon our memories rather than citations), contributors note challenges related to bandwidth limitations, making it difficult if not impossible to download media- (audio or video) rich blogs. They also may face restrictions on downloading media players or browser plug-ins to play back A/V blog elements.

Though I’ve begun listening to, and earmarking podcasts of interest, I prefer text in blogs, too, for reasons beyond downloading and playback difficulties. Granted, A/V podcasts are of great interest to educators who are intent upon presenting material that will help learners to develop listening and viewing skills.

However, for time-challenged educators and learners, sitting through podcasts is hardly a viable option. Attention spared while driving or cycling, I argue, is insufficient for uptake of ideas, intents, structures and vocabulary. Under such circumstances, note-making and cross-referencing are virtually impossible – unless you have a clip-board or keyboard mounted on your steering wheel or handlebars (or are concurrently recording your own commentary). Moreover, for city-dwelling pedestrians, traffic noise may well defeat listening at anything less than hearing threatening playback volumes on mp4 or mp3 players.

Rather than rant on about the drawbacks of podcasting, and before I develop a fuller argument for properly framing podcasts to develop learners’ listening skills and vocabulary, I’d better point out the LearningTimes Green Room and suggest that you check it out before the folks there quit providing nearly complete transcripts in show notes on their website as a prelude to their podcasts.

This post begins by recapping Parry (2006) and continues as a virtual dialog digesting and reflecting upon larger chunks of Parry’s article (a Blogging for Beginners workshop task-related reading).

Recap

Laying the groundwork of an argument for class-based RSS feeding, Parry (2006) points out need for learners to make effective use of two distinct sets of analytical reading skills, especially in online venues: “one, the quick analysis to find what is worth reading, and the second, a switch to slow analysis to carefully consider what has been found” (Parry, 2006, Helping Students to Become Better Readers to Become Better Writers, paragraph 3). He argues that RSS supports the first, and saves time for the second. Rather than provide an RSS tutorial, Parry points out a number of other guides, and concludes by claiming “RSS alters the transmission (reading and writing) of digital knowledge, and thus is critically important to any classroom instruction which requires digital composition, but especially projects which involve blogging” (Parry, 2006, Conclusion).

Three Large Tender Morsels for Digestion

To require students to write papers and then post them to a blog or website misses the point. In fact, this often results in frustrated students, because understandably they fail to see the relevance of such writing. Instead, productive classroom blog projects focus on teaching students how writing for the internet requires a different type of authorship—again, an important lesson in how context shapes meaning.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 1)The point Parry makes about relevance to learners is a point well taken. Simply transferring learners’ papers to blogs won’t necessarily foster awareness of or engagement with blog audiences. However, if they’re first time bloggers, and one of their initial tasks is to introduce themselves, blogging a previously written piece of introductory writing may serve to bootstrap inter-personal communication by almost immediately supporting commentary from group, class or community members. Blogging a prepared piece of writing at course onset also may provide a baseline, or sample, and serve as a proto-portfolio component, indicating learners’ initial interests and writing abilities.

… In order to be successful authors in this space, students need to construct content that takes advantage of the iterability and citationality that the web offers…. This type of citation and appending comments to citation is crucial to becoming critically engaged readers and writers.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 2)Granted, there is a lot more opportunity to experiment in writing spaces such as blogs than there is almost anywhere but in wikis – “Weblogs on steroids” (Tomei & Lavin, 2007, cited in Wikis and websites and blogs, oh my! B4B message 319). Nevertheless, starting with a prepared text at first (say something already composed in a notebook or with a word-processor) could provide learners with a ready-made platform for experiments with the kinds of web-based functions that Parry finds advantageous.

… By using RSS, you can syndicate all of the students blogs; every student in the class will get the class “newspaper” with headlines and synopsis of each student’s writing, allowing them to scan all of the posts at once, and then decide which ones are most relevant, and select them for close reading. Furthermore, RSS can facilitate commenting, as most blogs will allow you to syndicate the comments to a specific post, so that students can post to a blog and continue to follow up on the comment thread. Again, this will help students to realize how writing for the web is a matter of continuous conversation rather than static paper design.

(Parry, 2006, Why it Matters for Student Writing, paragraph 3)The third and final bit of Parry that I cite above (Why it matters…, para. 3) seems based on an assumption that learners within a group, class or community have individual blogs – as opposed to simple posting or commenting privileges on a group or class blog, and at least commenting if not also posting privileges on one anothers’ blogs. To extend the newspaper analogy, it seems educators then need to assume two inter-related roles: first, as editors and publishers of the learners’ stories through RSS newspapers; and second, particularly in case they are teaching learners of English as an additional language, teachers of newspaper reading skills.

References

Parry, David. (2006). The Technology of Reading and Writing in the Digital Space: Why RSS is crucial for a Blogging Classroom. Retrieved January 26, 2007, from http://blogsforlearning.msu.edu/articles/view.php?id=6

Tomei, J., & Lavin, R. (2006). Autonomy Arising from Community:
Experiences with Weblogs and Wikis [Keynote (trademark) presentation].
Kumamoto University: January 14, 2006.

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

Attribute to “pab’s potpourri”.

Whilst scouting neighboring tribes in the blogosphere, I found a blog among MaryH’s listings called Learning with Computers [LwC]: A community blog for the Learning with Computers Yahoo! Group.

What first caught my eye on that blog were a couple definitions posted there by one of MaryH’s blog mates, which distinguish two different purposes of blogs:

The Filter Style Blog vs The Journal Style Blog (July 28, 2006).

In retrospective, those definitions makes this blog sound like a combination of both styles, a combination which I hope the blog title “potpourri” accurately reflects.

Although the LwC blog apparently has gone into hybernation (since October 2006), a comment linked to the filter vs. journal definitions (above) points out a typical filter blog that is still up and running, namely: The Generator Blog

Looks like some of the generators filtering through there are worth checking out. Two more generators have shown up since I started this blog entry!

Food for thought:

All that I am really doing is putting together on single spot for my students to be able to access it quickly and efficiently so that they can expand their knowledge about certain topics we cover in class.

This post covers a review of eight blogging applications in which Campbell (2005) offers guidelines for choosing amongst them and other tools like them to use for language learning purposes.

Campbell suggests that blogs provide opportunities for “authentic use of language” that will challenge and stimulate learners “in ways that classroom experiences cannot” (Campbell, 2005, Choosing the right weblog application, paragraph 1).

Below are principle blog features to seek (Merits) and avoid (Demerits) that I’ve gleaned from Campbell’s review of existing applications (2005), combined with a few others, and arranged roughly in descending order of importance:

Merits

• user-friendliness from the get-go (signup) including language choices;
• WYSIWYG, drag-&-drop editing and automated link assistance;
• author-ownership with edit-ability at any time, including time stamp updates;
• search and tagging or labeling functions;
• ease of setting levels of access, moderation, publicity & security;
• integrated, nearly unlimited file, A/V media and photo storage, and independent page options;
• variety of simple, easily accessible themes with intuitive (drag & drop) module arrangements;
• readily accessible, easy to use, built-in aggregators;
• networking options extending beyond immediate blogging services/venues, including whole and partial RSS feeds; &
• spell-checking functions.

Demerits

• external email necessary for confirmation, and forced local language displays;
• HTML coding skills necessary
• text-only comments;
• low contrast (text to background) themes with restricted font sizes;
• fixed or heavily constrained column, frame and window sizes for both input and display;
• same-service membership required to comment; &
• advertising.

Campbell, Aaron. (2005). Weblog applications for EFL/ESL classroom blogging: a comparative review. TESL-EJ, 9(3). Retrieved January 24, 2007, from http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej35/m1.pdf