The LTD Project Blog

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.

It is such a pleasure to have hooked up with the Learning with Computers (LwC) group – all the more so now that the group had undertaken to explore Diigo, and is putting that free social bookmarking engine through its paces.

Messages flowing into my mailbox on a daily basis are hard to ignore, and fill a professional development gap that I’d hoped might, after I joined the EdubloggerWorld wiki and started monitoring the Tagging Standards page (along with all others on the latter site).

Actually, I cannot recall getting any notifications at all from the latter. That is why I’m so happy to be involved with the LwC crowd in a collective exploration of tagging practices.

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

Stashed away hither and thither in this office are notes accumulating from various presentations attended over the ages, some of which only come to light when virtually everything must move for floor waxing.

This spring, if I may call it that even though it’s threatening to snow tonight in southwestern Japan, the most surprising find has been the last page of notes from a faculty development session a year ago, almost to the day. It is short, sweet, and to the point:

Instill “educational heart” and teaching skills will follow.

([details to rediscover and insert about here: presenter, title...], 2007.03.07)

Machine translation from the original, vernacular wording of the phrase in question, 教育マインド (kyouiku mind), produces the phrase in quotations marks above. “Educational soul” might be just as accurate for an off-the-cuff translation.

It no doubt will be an adventure to explore the connotations of “educational heart,” one requiring suspension of beliefs regarding the easy-come, laissez-faire implications regarding development of appropriate teaching practices at the university level.

This is a micro-edited cross-post from a Learning with Computers message that [had] yet to appear on-list:

In learningwithcomputers@yahoogroups.com (message 3808), “Gladys Baya” <gladysbaya@…> points out a Camtasia-produced video demostration of Russell Stannard['s] giving screenplay + audio feedback on a short essay in English by a student from China:

http://www.russellstannard.com/king/king.html

Gladys asks: “Have you ever tried something like this in your own teaching practice?” In a follow-on, she suggests that “we are bound to differ in the way we go about giving feedback… [and] can profit from reflecting about this simple approach to discuss student-generated writing on screen.

A short answer would be, “No, I haven’t tried anything like that”, for one reason because I haven’t got Camtasia, though apparently older versions are available for free (Windows only). Nevertheless, I agree that Stannard['s] video demo. of one-to-one, tutor (teacher) to tutee (student) feedback deserves a good close look. What follow are some reflections.

We may notice that the student’s names and hometown feature prominently in the two paragraph self-introduction. We also may realize that Stannard… has made a widely-accessible public display of the work, spot-lighting and highlighting mistakes in it. His markings are monochromatic (yellow).

Though his feedback begins by focusing on a mistake, it includes a modicum of praise midway on (towards the end of the first paragraph – spotlighted, but left unmarked), and then more mistakes. Stannard… concludes with more positive observations about the communicativeness of the student’s piece, and suggestions for reviewing the video repeatedly and revising the essay.

Although in the essay the student claims better writing skills than speaking skills, in the feedback, which as Gladys points out is under three minutes, I would hardly call Stannard['s] speaking speed slow. He uses lots of teacher-talk, for example: “participle”, and “perfective” (if I caught those words right after two listenings). So I wonder whether the student will get it working alone, or even with near-peers.

I’d like to hear what catches the attention of other teachers of writing as they watch Stannard['s] video feedback demo:

http://www.russellstannard.com/king/king.html

(Beaufait, Learning with Computers,

Re: Video on teaching writing with computers [feedback demo.], message [3863],

November 30, 2007 [JST])

As you might suspect from the title of this post, what you may read here will heat up before it cools down. I’ve been chilling the content since February 23, 2007, already. If your can’t stand the residual heat or the pungent odor, please skip this message.

The purpose of this response to an EVO survey is to cool down by metaphorically singeing the monkey’s tail. Nine times out of ten (or more) that I bother to engage a Survey Monkey instrument, I get hot under the collar – for a number of reasons.

First and foremost is the off-the-wall time estimates that preface many surveys. If surveyors really want no more than five to ten minutes of our time, they don’t want substantive feedback. They are just going through the motions. Or, they are lying up front just to get responses, and hoping that respondents will follow up on their time investments, once they get started. (Echo Neil Young’s song, Piece of …, about here.)

Second, even when the surveys and time estimates come from prestigious institutions (research universities and professional organizations), they fail to demonstrate rigo(u)r in item preparation (or I suppose, piloting). For example, items 8-10 of a recent Electronic Village Online (EVO) survey conflate any number of serious research questions. If you just tick a box, fine; but what does that mean; or, for that matter, what do three or four ticked boxes on a single item mean?

Almost every time that I engage a Survey Monkey questionnaire, I start humming and rehearsing the lyrics of Neil Young’s song: “Take it back to the store; they give you four more….” Doing so used to get me through – sometimes an hour or more beyond surveyors’ time estimates, but hardly does anymore.

Then there is the issue of feedback on feedback. In recent experience (say, the last three to five years), most Survey Monkey surveyors have neither prefaced their instruments with promises to provide feedback, nor (to my knowledge [with possibly one exception]) provided any feedback whatsoever to survey participants other than: “Thank you; you’re done.”

Why don’t feedback loops involve contributors? Perhaps they aren’t really loops, but vacuums.

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.

Over in the Learning Times Green Room (TM), a discussion about “‘Lurking’ in online classes” continues. Whether I like the connotations of “‘lurking’” or not, that Green Room Comments space reflects neither class- or course-based organizational principles. So I have no qualms about coming and going there as time and interest permit.

Of particular interest, I find, in a return visit and review of recent comments, is an analogy of participation in online discussions as a form of respiration, inhaling and exhaling. I had glossed over that anatomical analogy in hasty previous readings. After another long, deep inhalation there, I exhale here as previously (Learner-centered approaches challenge standardization).

Among those Green Room Comments also is speculation that “sustainable discussion” might be a new turn of phrase. However, I find that it has been around since at least 1996 (Google search) for discussion of sustainable environmental practices.

Yet it seems that there is room for reappropriation and redefinition of the phrase “sustainable discussion” with respect to online learning environments. So, why not give it another go, here or there – making it some sort of “moveable feast”?