The LTD Project Blog » blogging

WinK Core: Weblogging in Kumamoto

Paul Beaufait — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:45:31 +0000

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.

Locker cleaning: shedding light on pbones

Paul Beaufait — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:29:00 +0000

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)

Another Edublog and more Wikispaces

Paul Beaufait — Tue, 20 May 2008 01:49:53 +0000

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.