The LTD Project Blog

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!

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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.

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!

Thanks to a pointer from a colleague who shall remain anonymous, in a message entitled “anonymity, privacy, blogging” (personal correspondence, January 12, 2006), I discovered a Borderland post On Anonymous Student Blogging, but not immediately.

There had been a fault in the link that I followed, so I skipped across to another post, Blogs and Genre, in which Doug refers to blogospheres (re-)defined by John Evans (Are There Three Blogospheres (Revisited)?). Between the two of them (among other commentators), blog genre definitions emerge that hinge as much upon audience definitions as upon content, if not more so.

It’s going to take a while to explore all the ramifications of that serendipitous sidetrack. Hopefully further explorations along those lines will reveal gems to share or ideas to implement perhaps sooner rather than later in a workshop on Blogging for Beginners. In the mean time, this post may well serve as a stepping stone for anyone hopping by.

Wobbleys
Originally uploaded by pabeaufait.

Where Rick suggests various roles for member participants in WinK, that is, in a message posted within a less than public BaseCamp pilot, I find it impossible to respond with a picture. So I’m posting this here.

The illustration above is a [third] try to get at “other possible forms of participation and types of members” than just blogging learners and blogging teachers, which Rick suggests “might be a key to [community] sustainability” (Extending roles and styles of participation, November 29, 2006). A list of types might include core developers, founding members, volunteer or hired agents, facilitators, active blogging members, and possibly veteran commentators.

To suggestions regarding roles and styles of participation, I’d like to add one for a unified venue. I think that things are getting pretty twisted discussing WinK blogging and community development in a venue separate from WinK (namely BaseCamp), rather than unifying and consolidating activities, discussions and resources in one bloggable, community-friendly venue.

A unified venue, with searchable, feedable, public and protected components, might well minimize necessity of navigating back and forth, and transferring, transforming, or recreating bits and pieces from one venue to the next. At present WinK-related activity seems scattered from the blogosphere, to Rick’s website, to Joe’s wiki, to a BaseCamp project, and possibly to unseen glaciers, cirques, and summits beyond.

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