The LTD Project Blog

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.

Making a leap, I’ve created another Edublog for language learner development purposes. Although the companion wiki is still in a conceptual development phase, I expect to use the LLD Project Blog for modeling, journaling, and filtering posts for audiences of college-aged English as an additional language (EAL) learners, Japanese university students in particular.

I don’t expect it to remain as narrowly focused as the Writing Studio Blog that I’ve been running on Blogger for a bit over a year now. In spite of familiarity with Blogger functionality, I decided to make the leap into Edublogs and blended instruction with students in an English for communicative purposes course that I resumed teaching in April this year (2008).

After reading Sue Waters clarification of the differences between categories and tags (Edublogger, What’s The Difference…, 2008.03.02), I deliberately established three initial categories that correspond to the intended purposes of the new Edublog. Those are fostering and facilitating development of learners’ computer literacy along with their language skills, and a degree (modicum?) of autonomy in their own learning (LLD Project Blog, About).

Having grown accustomed to dedicating Wikispaces to individual courses, it wasn’t much trouble to build a course wiki for the blended course before actually deciding whether to go with another blog. However, I felt an itch to consolidate resources and tutorials less directly related to course assignments somewhere they would be equally accessible to students in all of the courses that I teach, in a venue less noticeably earmarked for teachers than the Language Teacher Development Project Wiki. Hence there now is a budding Wikispaces companion, the Language Learner Development Project Wiki.

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).

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).

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 work in progress, cceraso defines a portfolio and provides rationales for learners’ creating and maintaining them. She answers the questions:

• What are the advantages of keeping a portfolio?
• Why do we keep it online?

Then, at the end of her definition, she refers readers to wikipedia definitions of portfolios and e-portfolios.

I’m looking forward both to coming developments on an adjacent portfolio evaluation page, and to seeing how portfolios are coupled with self-assessment tasks for learners collaborating on the Corpus wiki.

If you’re interested in portfolio creation on a blog, Helen Barrett shows and tells how to go about it. For a review of her demo., see: Wordpress blog for portfolio (The LTD Project Blog, 2007.03.15).

This blog has been long overdue for a face lift and updates. It got them today; I:

1. Imported posts from pab’s potpourri;
2. Selected a new theme, Mandigo (with variations); &
3. Opted for three column display (double sidebars, right):

Sidebar 2 is next to the text and Sidebar 1, on the far right. The header and footer look like they’ll be fun to tweak, too.

Earlier on, in pab’s potpourri, I re-listed and categorized blogs to which I had gravitated consequent to participating in a Blogging for Beginners workshop towards the beginning of this calendar year. I’m planning to add notes to the grid of blogs that I’d visited as I (re- )revisit them (Selection and sorting, 2007.03.08).

Before, during and after that workshop, I became aware of or developed inter-connections between some of those blogs and wikis. However, not all of them seem deliberately inter-woven, and many of the blogs that I listed may have no wiki counter-parts.

In this post (or subsequent ones), I intend to explore and highlight blog – wiki interstices and advantages that they offer. It is my express hope that this exploration reveal unexploited potentials as well as the status quo.

Wikispaces

• englishi-ii (owner)
• englishv-vi (owner)
• readingclub (member)
• theltdproject (owner)