The Group Badge below represents a Diigo group forming in Kumamoto to animate, promote, and study blogging initiatives and leadership within an expanding online community. The acronym WinK, for Weblogging in Kumamoto, indicates the group’s geographic focus, though not its initial tertiary education nexus.
The group description in the badge should be self-explanatory. If not please feel free to ask for additional information or clarification in comments on this post. Keywords for the Diigo group include: blogging, collaboration, community, education, leadership, technology, and writing.
A graphic representation for the Diigo group, to replace the default avatar, is in the works. We’ll stew on shortening the group name to fit badge width.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
With reference to Susan Metos (2005), who defines a learning object as a “digital resource” that “include[s] or link[s] to (1) a learning objective, (2) a practice activity, and (3) an assessment,” Brian Lamb explains the demise of learning objects:
With only the noblest of intentions, proponents of learning objects (and I was one of them) went at the problem of promoting reuse by establishing an arduous and complex set of interoperability standards and then working to persuade others to adopt those standards. Educators were asked to take on complex and ill-defined tasks in exchange for an uncertain payoff. Not surprisingly, almost all of them passed.
Lamb, Brian. (2007). Dr. Mashup; or, Why Educators Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Remix. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 4 (July/August 2007), 12-25. Retrieved September 3, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm07/erm0740.asp?bhcp=1
Metos, Susan E. (2005). Learning Objects: A Rose by Any Other Name…. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 40, no. 4 (July/August 2005), 12–13. Retrieved September 3, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm05410.asp
The more involved that you get with your blog, the greater the chance is that you or the blogging service that you’re using will mess it up radically. So here is a bit of advice to myself as much as anyone:
Backup / Restore Template
Before editing your template, you may want to save a copy of it. Download Full Template….
(Blogger: Settings: Template: Edit HTML)
You do want to backup your template before you radically change it, don’t you?
In comments on Sessums’ weblog entry, Frances Bell cites Facebook terms of use and asks another telling question: “If user content had already been reused or republished, what meaning would expiry of license have?”
Though this may be just the tip of an information iceberg, is it not too late to steer clear?
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.
Tomei, J., & Lavin, R. (2006). Autonomy Arising from Community:
Experiences with Weblogs and Wikis [Keynote (trademark) presentation].
Kumamoto University: January 14, 2006.
If you’re interested in exploring intellectual property rights in some breadth, if not depth, below are a few more pointers to round out those in a previous post about Aussie copyright concerns. These are from three collections:
1. A working bibliography on disk (entries lacking annotations, for resources currently accessible):
Downes, Stephen. (2003). Copyright, ethics and theft. Journal of the United States Distance Learning Association 17(2), 51-62. Retrieved January 31, 2007, from http://www.usdla.org/html/journal/ED_APR03.pdf
If you discover any articles at Educause (or elsewhere) that you find particularly easy to understand and applicable to our work (educational blogging), please don’t hesitate to say which and why in a comment related to each.
The message extracts below pose some hard questions about copyright laws that I wrote in reaction to the 08 Nov. Internet Industry Association (IIA) news release cited in the message. I got a pointer to the news release from the Teach and Learn Online Google Group.
That article quotes Peter Coroneos, Chief Executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) saying, “The US Free Trade Agreement does not require Australia to go down this [onerous] path, and neither US nor European law contain such far reaching measures” [as the Australian parliament enacted].
Is that [the IIA's] assessment of current U.S. law accurate?
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