While searching the Curry School’s site for dissertation formatting guidelines (and not turning up any, I might add, even though I *know* there is a very specific list out there somewhere), I did discover the rumblings of a Curry IT program blog, which sadly appears to have been abandoned at the end of the semester. Hopefully, this is just a temporary hiatus…
Now that’s dedication. I can say with certainty that I procrastinate a good deal of that time span…every. single. day.
Dean asks, “Is a blog a blog if there are no comments?” I find this ties in with my questions in the past few posts—is a blog a blog if it does not have a global audience? Is a blog a blog without trackbacks? One thing I can say with certainty, x is not a blog without RSS. Now that I’ve said it with certainty, I’m sure there will be someone to tell me I’m wrong.
Trying to understand what makes a blog a blog may seem irrelevant. However, the very essence of what blogs and wikis can provide—social collaboration, lateral spread of control over content, venue for discourse—is no longer radical if a blogging platform or wiki is simply appropriated so that students can make a website without knowing html.
This is just an informal post to list some of the issues and questions that came up in the course of our workshops today on RSS feeds, blogs, social bookmarking and podcasting (and every place I use blogs in this post, feel free to replace with dynamic social collaboration tools). I don’t want to lose these thoughts, and I will if I don’t write them down. So in no particular order:
-I was surprised about the initial perceptions about blogging and particularly myspace as largely negative and mostly irrelevant to education. There was mention of the association of myspace with crime (I’m guessing the resonating effects of the Taylor Behl case).
-The question was raised—why is it that a child who would freak out if their mom invaded the privacy of their room is willing to post all kinds of private information (name, address, school, etc) in an online forum such as myspace?
-It was expressed that blogging content is not reliable information (fair enough) and thus information from blog sources may not be appropriate for the classroom. This is an interesting one. I’m going to take this a little farther with a RL (real life) analogy. If we were all sitting at the corner store, having a glass of soda on the porch and having a conversation, how would we know whose information to trust? The “blogosphere” is not really all that different—the information is as credible as the source, and all netizens must develop the skills to be adept at evaluating the source. Looking at who is authoring a site, who connects to or comments on their site, what sources they refer to—this is how we can start to construct a perspective of what is “true” using a variety of information sources.
-The above leads into the larger point—we cannot just think of blogs purely as CONTENT. They are dynamic. The information is updated with regularity. The style is colloquial. It is PROCESS, not PRODUCT driven. The perspective of the writer is hopefully changing, growing, developing over time. The affordances built into a blogging platform allow for discourse and quick linking to original sources and other commentary. The interactions with others through the medium; the links to the words of others; belonging to a community of discussion–this is the larger picture of the potential of these RSS-fueled media.
- A lot of concerns about privacy, and what is appropriate and not appropriate for students to discuss openly. When confidentiality, privacy, building insular trust in a class is critical, blogging/podcasting/etc is not appropriate. Are controversial topics appropriate? Where do free speech lines get crossed?
-For educators preparing professionals in the community (nurses, teachers, etc.), even if blogging is not integral to the course, discussion of one’s representation of self online could be key, as inappropriate content online can derail a career.
-Can .swf files embedded in RSS feed be automatically detected and downloaded to a podcatcher (Juice)? Are there any restrictions on the type of embedded media that can be dowloaded via a podcatcher?
-My own question—is blogging behind password protection still blogging? Or is it something else? This is only an issue at this point because Blackboard is so backwards in terms of not providing any kind of blogging space that would be worth using, and because they do not provide a way to link RSS feeds from discussion boards. (In other words, our choices at my institution are a basic discussion board or a wide-open-to-the-world blog.) When those features are added, I hypothesize that the majority of educators interested in blogging will step back behind their content management system for student discourse. And that’s ok. But we still need to understand what is going on with all that information is out there in the blogosphere.
-The progression the use of these tools need to take is for students to become adept at finding useful information to their process of lifelong learning, to create their own content, to participate in educational communities that sustain the curiosity that convinced students to enroll in a course in the first place.
Some things we did not talk about nearly enough:
-Use of these tools for communication is fundamentally changing how we interact with others. There is no way around this, once you start digging in. In addition, once you start to “lurk” and comment on blogs, these changes begin.
-I do not like to the buy into the myth of the “millenial” students, who are basically cyborgs at this point. That is way too simplistic. These students–perhaps more than older students who understand what we are giving up and sacrificing in the way of privacy, and who have certain conceptions of what constitutes a “trusted source”–NEED space and guidance in reflecting on the nature of information and communication in the age of ICT.
-The truly positive side to these social communication and collaboration tools in terms of connecting isolated individuals with various needs (whether it be educational, community support in dealing with an illness or life difficulty, friendship) and providing a space, not connected with geography, to form human ties.
-If one believes that most of what is on blogs is useless drivel and too much information, what sources of information do you trust and why? We give a lot of credence to information that is “published” because it has been peer-reviewed. In a heavily read blogging site with many readers, isn’t that also “peer-reviewed” to some extent? Are experts always acting in the interest of simply deploying truth, or are there other factors at play?
All in all great audience participation and questions.
From the presentation this morning, what do you see as the possible applications of social computing tools in your instruction? What activities would you like to be able to do online that you can’t do now? What challenges do you see in using some of these new tools in your instruction?
Here is the first Cultivating Minds podcast. This is a short excerpt (10 min) of an interview with Nate Lowell about what RSS RSS feeds are, why one might consider using an aggregator to organize them, his own tactics for organizing information in an aggregator, and how to make sense of all these new sources of information (”There has always been too much information, we just didn’t know it.”)
Another post on e-clippings talks about the “spacing effect”. To fragment his quote borrowed from wikipedia even more:
“…you will be much more likely to remember it if the exposures are repeated over a longer span of time...
My doctoral advisor always had little nuggets of wisdom throughout the three years I supported his courses and one of them was that TIME is one of the certain variables in learning. Of course as I write this, I realize that it works both ways—we are more likely to remember concepts and ideas presented over time and when we have taken some time apart from the same concepts and ideas, we are less likely to remember them.
“…Time, cruel time
Runs along.
And so as I
Couping up with time.
Time…
That time
Which time & again times us
To race the time. …” excerpt from Pausal Time, arghyaraj chanda
I love the idea of Suprglu, however, I went to check out the page I set up as a prototype a few months ago. The last time it updated was in May. My calendar says June 8th. Such a timeline might be acceptable for a printed document that then needed to be mailed to me at book shipping speeds; but this is the internet! I can’t in good conscience recommend this, now matter how cool the concept.
So then I stumbled across a Webtops & Wikis post on e-clippings, finding all kinds of new possibilities I didn’t know even existed. I started at Protopage. I’m not sure it’s what I would use all the time, but it was SUPER (not supr) easy to edit :). No registration required to play around, which is refreshing. What I would like is a site where other can add feeds as well, I think.
I saw Mark’s comment at the end of his post about del.icio.us tags as well. I just understood the whole functionality of the site the other day—but I can’t think where I was reading that it all came together in my mind. I was trying to figure out how a class would share ideas without making a complex network etc and voilá—I realized that you can make a completely original tag (which does present some challenges) and use that to collectively co-locate information. For example, for a workshop I’m doing on Friday, I created the tag: TechSummit2006. If you visit: http://del.icio.us/tag/TechSummit2006 all of the tags that the participants will (hopefully) add will be collected there.
I also discovered that you can add people to your network, and send them links (which will appear in the “links for you” space). To tag things for others in your network, you simply tag them for:username.
However, back to Mark’s question, I think that using del.icio.us to gather resources is not 100% effective because you can not display the actual feeds. What I would want is for people to be able to see the feeds as they update. Of all the ways this is possible, I still think drupal is the best way to do this, but it is not “free” (though it is financially free): It requires someone with the know-how to install and administer drupal, which is not the case for many people.
“When you bring blogs into your courses—at least the way I am talking about—you have to move in new directions. There’s no choice but to embrace a connected, collaborative learning model, one that puts the students and the subject matter in direct contact with one another within a real-world context. We blogging teachers give up a whole lot of control. Authority shifts from the teacher in the center to the entire group in a noded network. You cannot always predict outcomes—what kids will write on the blogs, what they will learn, how the chemistry of the learning group and the interaction with the outside world will contribute to the experience. How terrifying, how risky—how like life.”- bgblogging
Up until the AMTEC conference, I was completely on board with the line of argument put forth in bg’s excellent post at the UK’s first edublogging conference. However, Terry Anderson (read his articles!) of Athabasca University who has been instrumental in getting an institutional blogging platform at the university, presented a compelling counter argument that student blogging should occur in systems that give control over who sees the content—whether it’s limited to only the student, student and instructor, classmates or the whole community. (I don’t know if ELGG gives all those options, but from the description of structuring access, I would hope that these levels are all available). That argument has really made me think carefully about what we risk when we blog, and what we give up when we start fencing off blogs.
Now, there are very pertinent reasons why this should be a concern to educators and administrators. At the high school level, there have been recent expulsions for content posted online: for perceived threat, for revealing sexual orientation and that list will go on as time goes on.
What about at the college level? Here, it looks more similar to the professional world, where one can lose one’s job for what is posted on a blog. One example is where a student from Marquette Dental school was suspended for content posted on his blog. In neither case did the “perpetrators” name the names of those they were criticizing publicly.
Of course, none of those instances involved students being suspended for what they blogged about for a class assignment. And who would ever think of suspending students for expressing their thoughts or feelings in the context of a class assignment? Except if someone refers to Columbine: Maine student suspended for speech. I chose that example, because of course, it’s already been happening with essays and speeches that have not been online at all for a number of years now. And on a rare occassion, action might be warranted— I didn’t even mention the more publicly heralded averted Columbine-commemorating plot uncovered on myspace. The real thwarted disasters then fuel the fear that justifies all the other frivolous violations of free speech.
The point of all this is that there are very real ramifications for what one posts on a public space. And, in fact, that is precisely WHY it is important to provide guidance to students in terms of thinking about audience and what is appropriate for an open audience. There is both power and responsibility in having such a wide audience to share with. If parents and teachers aren’t teaching students about this PROACTIVELY –then who is supposed to? Does it really make sense if educational blogging is done behind “closed” access with limited audience, while the same students are posting all of their personal business all over myspace? It certainly will limit institutional liability, which often seems to supercede student learning in terms of priority of educational concerns.
Journaling has its place in educational settings too. But journaling is not blogging. Journaling denotes a private reflective space. The power of blogs is in the collaborative and interactive nature of the design and affordances. When you limit access to student blogs to create an exclusive class community, you reduce the blogging to the functionality of a class discussion board and, presuming there already is a class discussion board (depending on course management software being used), there is not really a great deal of need for a nearly duplicate functionality.
Perhaps I am very slow to notice these innovations. I cast aside bloglines months ago because I hate having to remember to GO there. I love that using Sage, I need only press that little magnifying glass to subscribe to the feed of desired blog. HOWEVER, I do not love that in using about four different computers I never have exactly the same subscription list. It makes it very difficult to retain any kind of consistent reading habit. But, in preparing for the TechSummit workshop this coming Friday, I stumbled upon this: the Bloglines Subscription button. Perhaps it has always been there, lurking in the background. The only annoying thing is that after you subscribe to the feed, it takes you into bloglines completely instead of back to the site you were adding. Not insurmountable, but not perfect either.