johoca

I have just watched a presentation by Konrad Glogowsky http://www.slideshare.net/teachandlearn/assessment-and-evaluation-in-the-age-of-networked-learning as a part of the blogging4educators blogging course. I found it very inspiring. The presentation is about the use of blogs in teaching, and the predominant theme of the presentation was, at least for me, blogging as a conversation and a way to empower the students in terms of allowing them to read and write about what they want and in doing so allowing them to have ownership of the course and their writing. I am in the final stages of planning my freshman course for the coming semester and like the last two semesters I will use blogs in the class. However, it may have two strands. What I had planned was that the blog would be a way for the students to interact with the short stories, create a learning community outside the classroom by encouraging the students to comment on each others blogs and as a possible alternative to participating in the classroom. After having watched this presentation though what I think I might do is have two strands for the blog- one for the literature and one for the research paper. So then the blog would be like a writing down of the research process for the paper. The students can write summaries of the articles, sites, videos etc. they find related to the topic they choose for their research paper and critically engage with that material in their blog. I think that in this way I can give the students more guidance in the process of the research and other students can also get ideas for their own research or just use it to see what others are doing, they can ask questions, maybe encouraging their peers to be more critical or helping them to look at different sides of the issue. I am also hoping that this might encourage the students not to leave their research to the last minute. Another thing that it will enable the student to do is to create a body of work that they have complete ownership of and as Glogowsky outlines in his presentation this can enable the students to be reflective learners/researchers and they can also partake in the assessment process by evaluating the blog ‘as a body of work’ at the end of the semester.

At the moment as well as doing the blogging4educators online blogging course I am also reading about blogs and looking at different educational blogs on the internet. In the past week or so I have learned quite a bit about blogging. I had no idea of what an RSS feed was- now I more or less know. I found a nice little video actually. I have learned a little about blogreaders (is that the right term??) as well, and coincidentally at the same time, started using myyahoo as my blog reader, and have started subscribing to other blogs- it makes life much easier! I have also discovered bloglines as well as numerous other sites. One of which is eatonweb which is a compilation of the blogs out there. I found this from one of Rebecca Blood’s articles on the history of blogging. This a quite interesting reading matter.

In the course of reading different articles in order to write my own, I have come up with a few newish ideas of how to use them in my spring semester class. I am thinking of making them compulsory again as I had made them the first time I used blogs in class, and making them assessable. The class actually didn’t like them being compulsory but then I didn’t really reward the students much in terms of grades for doing their blogs, this semester I have maybe 10 to a maximum of 20 marks that I can play with for the writing of blogs. I intend to make it clearer why I want to use blogs in the class, share the rationale more and spend more time in class introducing the concept of blogs as well as the technoology. I think it will be used more as a journal type thing but also as a community with students required to comment on others’ blogs. More on this later.