Quote: "I'm having my students keep a personal blog on any subject they like--primarily to establish a practice of near-daily writing in relation to reading. Some like it, some don't. But in those that blog often, I have seen a marked improvement in their writing. I think it is because blogging connects writing to thinking in a very concrete way..." (Taken from here.)
Certainly, the more one writes, the better one gets. Holds true for just about anything. I guess the question then is what's the best way to bring students to the Web logging habit? I like the idea of a reader response notebook, or a reading journal. Ask them to do 5-10 minutes a night? And, the other point here of course is finding some way to evaluate the improvement in their writing...

So much to do. [Will Richardson]

1:43:03 PM    

So here's the first installment of my Action Research Update. It's basically a reflection for myself on what I see so far but feedback is welcome. [Joe Luft]

1:43:03 PM    

[grumpy girl]

A nice cartoon conversation about Weblogs...

1:43:03 PM    

As this quarter winds down, I'm thinking about how to fold my rekindled enthusiasm for web-related technologies into the two courses I'm teaching next quarter--Web Design & Implementation for undergrads, and a seminar in XML for the Web (undergrads and grads).

Group and individual blogs seemed like a no-brainer concept, but I've had a hard time finding them used effectively in higher ed contexts.

Then today, I saw a mention on grumpygirl's blog that led me to a blog that was clearly written by a student whose professor was talking about web design. The problem? As grumpygirl notes, the student provides no contact info, and no link back to a class site.

Not to be deterred, I change into my alter-ego, the technolibrarian. (Cue music. "Ain't no info lost enough, ain't no details obscured enough, ain't no meta tags bad enough, to keep me from finding more about you..."). A search in Google on Jessica's user ID and her teacher's last name (which she's helpfully mentioned in a post) yields quick results. She's apparently a student in in Charles Lowe's Writing About Digital Culture class at Florida State.

My first assumption was that it would be a technology course, but it's not. It's a freshman comp class! How cool is that? Geez, my freshmen would love a class like this. I need to find a way to open a channel of communication with the Language and Lit department at RIT about this. (Luckily, my mom teaches there. How convenient. :-) [Elizabeth Lawley]

1:43:02 PM    

Links to the Berkeley Intellectual Property Web log that is the fruit of a graduate journalism class at UCB and went live last week. Two notes...first, in the past few days I've been hitting more and more Web logs powered by Moveable Type. I must say I like the easy feel of the sites, and they offer some interesting features that Manila doesn't. I'm not sure if MT would be a more suitable classroom answer, but it seems like it does most of what I use Manila from. Might be something to look into (just for fun!) Kind of goes back to that discussion we had long ago about a CMS just for the classroom. How much would the Manila creators be willing to implement some education specific ideas, I wonder? (BTW, the UCB class's criteria for a CMS are here.)

The other comment has to do with the class. I think it's pretty cool that the students were assigned "beats" to cover. To quote: "That was designed both to divide up responsibilities for coverage among ourselves, and also give the public a better sense of the scope of the Weblog. The beats were reflected in the Weblog itself, offering people the options of reading the general postings in the main section, or going quickly to a subtopic of intellectual property they were particularly interested in. The beat structure also provided us with a logical place to post the topical stories the students were writing." Pretty close to what I was thinking, but articulated and carried through much more effectively, of course.

Their thinking about editing was equally interesting. "Weblogs, by their nature, invite postings that are informal and instantaneous. But their value to readers lies largely in comments that are well written and thoughtful. For journalists this tension is even more acute. Weblogs allow the opportunity to avoid some of the constraints of journalistic conventions and engage in a more personal dialog with readers. But other core journalistic values, like accuracy and clarity, must be retained. Many journalism Weblogs address this via different approaches to the question of whether and how postings should be subjected to the traditional journalistic editing process. In an attempt to balance these competing concerns, we decided that in almost all cases, postings would be reviewed by one other student or instructor in the class before being put on the Weblog. But in extreme cases where a posting is very time sensitive and of crucial importance to our readers, it could be posted to the Weblog without an editor's review. However, that posting would be reviewed by someone in the class after the fact."

Some very thought provoking stuff. I love the idea of Web log as beat compiler concept. Makes me think I should have set up my media kids Web logs the same way, although I'm sure it's more manageable with eight students than with 24. But that really is the concept that I'm after...disparate, specific research shared in the same space and moderated by student editors. Very cool. [Will Richardson]

12:43:11 PM    

"Oh ! Oui encore..."

(Cri de cavalier ;)) Et ton fil RSS qu'on entende ton cri quotidien !

12:32:07 PM    

Erreur de Casting ?

How unlucky for them : Microsoft has apparently been having a Ms. Moxie contest for something-or-other. Not clear.

Anyway, they apparently proceeded without running a search for the Real Deal. [The Doc Searls Weblog]

Moxie est à mon goût --et de loin-- beaucoup plus sexy pour tenter de construire des tutoriels attractifs ;-)

11:59:46 AM    

Blogs mostly catalog their creators' musings, with links to related sites, and as such they can be as hard to categorize as the people behind them. They're occasionally ferocious or funny, brilliant or banal -- and they all want your attention. But with more than half a million of these sites out there and new bloggers appearing all the time, how can you find the ones worth the commitment of a daily click?... [Geoffrey A. Fowler][via Der Schockwellenreiter]

11:42:39 AM    

I'd like to argue for schoolblogs as an incremental improvement over journaling. I ask you to grant me the power of journaling as a tool for advancing self-understanding and for understanding the world. Responding to life experience through writing and summarizing causes one to interlink and explain thus increasing understanding.

We now note that the writer of a weblog is aware of a potential audience that goes beyond the teacher. This awareness coupled with almost any form of the wish for understanding... has the writer developing ideas in smaller steps and with foundational explanation for the reader. Thus a fleeting impression (true or not) becomes a situated explanation and thus is better understood by the writer. Plus, of course, the self-chosen audience that reads this writer more than once and responds in similar spirity provokes further growth of the writer and has itself grown. This form of rational discourse makes communities of the mind that become with experience, effort and multiple rounds of 'listening' and 'speaking' more comprehensive with each round [Spike Hall]

11:42:39 AM    

Polvo and I were just yesterday discussing blogs in journalism education, recounting my earlier trials at pulling up funding for such a thing in attempted collaborations with Eric McLuhan, and musing future possibilities of ressurrecting such courseware for Derrick De Kerckhove, and what does my dear peerkat throw up at me but the same sort of bloggish journalism courseware forum thing alive and well and living in Berkeley.

Then again, maybe close but not quite...

The bIPlog aims to advance the debate over intellectual property by aggregating noteworthy, factual information with thought-provoking commentary.

... this sounds to me like "collaborative notebook" and the MT vehicle allows a bit of commentary, but comes up short on dialectic. bITlog, as an open-archive has element's of Eric's "evolving reference book which retains all prior revisions", but has only those comment-field whisps of my own e-classroom tenet, "e-learning that fails to model the hallways and cafeteria will fail to educate."

If you ask me, and they seldom do, the courseware blog needs to give each student their own space and let them bounce off each other in discourse; instead of MT, I might have started from drupal or geekLog to gain some community member-networking aspects. [Gary Murphy]

11:42:38 AM    

Propagande, Viralité...

...ou émulation inter-universitaire ? Pourrait-on assister à un BlogMatch entre Yale et Berkeley ? Cliquez sur la bannière pour en savoir plus sur la
belle "brochette" de mavens à croiser si vous êtes dans le coin ;-)

10:24:36 AM    

Un outil sans prix pour louveteaux

Apprendre à bâtir ses écrits. La structure engendrée et favorisée par des questions simples et justes. Ô chefs de meutes de ce monde, si votre progéniture en est à ses premières « rédac », aiguillez-la vers cette merveille des éditions Beauchemin. On y retrouve aussi des stratégies de mémorisation et des méthodes de recherche. Méthodologie. Puisé chez Pierre, dont le carnet est devenu, plus que jamais, une mine d'or ces derniers temps. Il en ajoute et en remet tous les jours, à ma grande joie !

NDLGR : Les chefs de meute ou enseignants souhaitant trouver des tuyaux pour favoriser et encourager de belles formes d'apprentissage voudront peut-être télécharger les conseils de Complètement métho (format pdf), aussi en vente en version complète (papier).

[Les coups de langue de la grande rousse]

Comment on peut s'abonner aux trouvailles de Pierre ? T'aurais son adresse RSS  ;-)
Bonne journée la grande ! Sacré besoin de jardinage aujourd'hui. Eliminer plein de mauvaises herbes ;-)

10:20:54 AM