Can be about blogs in general or blogs for teaching and learning.
Edublog workshop – part 4
feeds and aggregators
to desktop, browser, webpage
make your own!
Bloglines
demo…
ooh, i’m going to set up a bloglines account.
a bit about podcasts, iStanford etc
plus some interesting stuff i’ve shamelessly copied from Kate Boardman as the net connection here failed when I pressed ‘Save and continue editing’. So much for live blogging…
“rss mixers. do I like the sound of this? kickrss… . feed2js, feedbook (great idea by dave cormier -ideological prototype on giving students aggregator of feeds rather than a course book), SuprGlu (mixing different blogs)”
By the way Apple have insisted that ipodder Lemon, the main competition for download podcasts to your iPod, change their name as Apple think we’ll all get confused. So iPodder Lemon is now Juice Receiver (?ughh)
Can you tell it’s nearly 3.30pm?
The rest of the session was spent, how can I say, playing with the various blog related tools.
Cheers,
Kris.
Blogging notes from edublog workshop – part 3
Part 3 – after lunch
Learning Theory and online networking tools
ways of thinking and knowing, ways of doing (practice), social networking tools
theories of learning
behaviourism (Gagne), cognitivism (Piaget), social constructivism (Vygotsky), sittuative learning (Wenger), + Connectionist – forming networks, pattern recognition
context and related task types for each theory (e.g. cognitivism > problem based learning)
socio-cultural model –
learning is a conversational activity, social environment acts as scaffold for tutor and learner to engage in dialogue. collaborative activity forms vital component.
what changes are we responding to?
-
tech – ubiquitous computing
student profile and expectations
new pedagogies
external forces, global marketplace
community – rise of network society
information age mindset
-
computers are not technology
doing more important than knowing
trial and error preferable to logic
multitasking
typing not handwriting
staying connected
zero tolerance for delays
lines between consumer and producer are blurred
edu uses of weblogs
-
reflective practice
knowledge management
assignments
group work
e-portfolios
sharing resources
role play and simulation
Distance learning MA in war studies
core materials via LMS
dialogue via e-mail, discussion forums, skype, weblogs
access subject to temporal, distance and tech constraints
is a need to discover and create role in learning community
these relationships need to be made explicit through online dialogue (as they are normallly implicit face to face)
using WebCT vista
fitness for purpose
discussion fora – structured and semi-structured for knowledge building and dialogue (disputational, cumulative, exploratory)
weblogs – personal publishing for reflection, taking ownership of learning experience
wikis – knowledge sharing and building
Conversational tools
content free templates that scaffold “the inner conversation”, “outer conversation with tutor”, “outer conversation with resources in the personal domain”.
In practice
all students have a blog, tutor blogs
they use a newsfeed aggregator to collect blogs using RSS (bloglines)
What happened?
student evaluation
revealed strategic pragmatic economic management and perception of their own education
evaluation – time and assessment were key
connectivism
from community to network – student and tutor blogs link to external ‘expert blogs’ – forming a ‘knowledge network’
Knowledge can rest with the network…
Does our theory of knowledge drive our choice of tools?
Blogging notes from edublog workshop – part 2
Josie Fraser – history of blogs…
Intro. to blogging in education. Comparison of blog tools available.
History
1997 weblog in OED (really?)
1999 Blog coined
Technorati -eg of business that has grown around blogs
20 billion blogs by Oct 2005, 80k per day
Formats and tools
Ease of use
public and ungated – this is a debate within education, should they be open to all
Short posts, developmental, subjective, informal ‘enmeshed in distributed conversations’
Web 2.0 – user centred platform
That Downes man again (as in Stephen) – e-learning 2.0, recent article from ‘foremost edublogger in the world’ (!)
All types of users in education, at every level.
Finding a voice – a ‘blogging voice’. What do I want to say and how?
Schools – Musselburgh Grammar School using blogs for exchange purposes.
Researcher and edtech blogs – community of practice, Downes, Derek Morrison, James Farmer
edublog milestones – Gateshead Library since 2001. edublogs.org from James Farmer 1000th blog in 2 months, for educators. Now provides blogs for students.
edublogger directory
student blogs – to fulfil assessments
this is quite rushed!!!
Future VLE – Scott Wilson ‘the most popular diagram in e-learning world’
Comparison of blog tools
multi user and individual blog tools – wordpress recommended for multiusers
20six, aclblogs.net, aclearn weblogs toolkit, blogger, elgg, typepad, yahoo, xanga
Comparison chart (MS Word file)
The next part of the workshop was to go off and try another example of some blog software. I thought I’d go and try elgg as it has the added educational dimension that the others do not. It also has a social aspect through the use of FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) social networking and linking people by the use of tags. See my first elgg post!!
Now it’s time for lunch!
Blogging notes from edublog workshop
I don’t know whether I’ll keep this up, but I’ve decided to blog from the workshop and save making notes later. I doubt any of this’ll make sense, but I’ll maybe add detail (and links) later. I’ll publish in parts, as otherwise I’ll have one very long entry. So here goes…
Multitasking – chat, blogging and listening at the same time.
Intro
Social s/w tools – IRC, IM, discussions fora > social bookmarks (de.icio.us), social networks (friendster) > wikis, weblogs.
Who is blogging? communities, companies – but famous cases of people blogging about work getting the sack! universities (warwickBlogs), individuals – e.g. Stephen Downes
www.frappr.com/edubloggers – network of educational bloggers.
Um – and there’s a substantial chat session going on while the presenters speak. this is slightly bizarre.
Lots of description about what makes up a typical blog tool e.g. entries, categories, comments etc.
Trackbacks – way of saying ‘i’m using one of your posts in my blog’.
Why so popular?
Easy, democratic, allow [re]creation of self, playing with identity
Web 1.0 = Traditional static publishing via FTP etc.
New system – east, fast, scaleable > with RSS – syndicated, peer to peer, social > Web2.0
Update your blog, it’s not just words (KR ?)
RAMBLE
mo-blogging
video-blogging
photo-blogging
audio-blogging (podcasts)
Weblogs vs wiki
wiki – group
blog – personal
egs of wikis – usual suspects err – wikipedia
Information overload? how to manage gigantic flow of info (paraphrasing Robin Good quote)?
Answer: Use RSS
aggregators – some have embedded into web page – e.g. Stephen Downes
Bloglines – internet based tool but personalised
Web 2.0 – “an architecture of participation” Tim O’Reilly 2003
Just a slogan? web as platform (as opposed to web as medium)
web 2.0 and e-learning 2.0 what do they mean?
read/write web
consumer vs producer
online identity
community > network
point of presence
semantic web www.foaf-project.org
folksonomy
micro-content
e-learning framework (JISC)
so much jargon!!!!!
e.g. flickr
social tools and blogs – all good?
cons – just replacing old tech with new?
And time for some coffee!!
Trackbacks
are more manual pingbacks (see earlier message)
When you write a blog message about an article in another blog you need to include a Trackback URL which you get from the other blog. The results is the same as a pingback – your blog message becomes a comment on the other blog.
So are they useful? For connecting blog posts / articles / messages (which is correct???) I guess so but will users get them. Mind you as pingbacks are automatic they don’t really need to.
I’ve included a trackback URL in this message for the Pingback post! If you look at the Pingback post you’ll see this message is a comment.
The value of blogging
A nice line and a link to the corresponding cartoon.
âI had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barkingâ?
by Alex Gregory, The New Yorker, September 12, 2005
Pingbacks
Pingbacks and Trackbacks are two features of blogs. I’m still not sure about Trackbacks but i think I have Pingbacks sussed!
When you post an article to our blog any other blog articles you mention in your article are ‘pinged’ (contacted) as part of the publish process. If the blog you mentioned allows pingbacks then your mention of their article will appear as a comment on their site!! Confused? Here’s an example.
On a test blog: mattblog I have posted an article with a link to an article on our CLT blog. When I posted that message the CLT blog was notified via a ping and because the CLT blog allows pingbacks a comment was automatically added… if you take a look at the Multi user Blog Tools article on the CLT blog you will see 2 comments, including one that comes from my test mattblog!
In fact now there are 3 comments – one manual comment, one from mattblog and one from this article – an internal pingback!
Purpose / Use of CLT Blog(s)
In the team meeting today Steve R suggested opening this blog to the wider world. This seems a good a place as any to discuss this…
Ahead of having our own blog server it would be good to think about how we are going to use it / them- what’s the purpose? I’m not against opening the Blog up but do we need a closed Blog too? Maybe not. What would be really nice would be one blog with the ability to restrict posts or categories to certain users. So when posting a message it is either ‘public’ or ‘CLT’. I don’t think WordPress allows this but i may have missed it. I’ve seen it in other blog-type tools such as ELGG
If we’re opening this blog up do we need two? Is a ‘Learning technology News’ or a ‘CLT News’ category within this Blog a possible replacement for the defunct newsletter blog? From our CLT homepage we could just link to the relavant category, for example VLE Evaluation Category
The plan
is to use this blog for CLT internal communication, initially sharing links and info on the VLE evaluation and other topics. We can use categories to organise posts (Posts can be in multiple categories)
Matt
