finalproject - "blogging in education"

2005-12-09T08:17:00.000-08:00

Technology Project Proposal for Blogging

Teacher willuse blogging software Manila
Students will create personal blogs

Instructional use

1. Teacher uses to link to Internet items that relate to her course.
2. Teacher discuss, comments his own research, shearing his ideas, discoveries, problems, useful links etc.
3. Everybody discuss assigned readings – students have to read each other postings and comment on the postings using good arguments, links that support their arguments etc.
4. Students have to make artifact (mindful) and to publish. Students have to make artifact in the field of their interest (in given subject domain) searching for information from different resources including visiting other people (not from class blogs in the same field of interest.
5. Peers have to post comments on each other artifacts.
6. Teacher gets experts or nonclass people to visit the student blogs with published artifacts and to comment on them.

How it promotes transformational teaching and learning.
Why blogging is so essential here.

1. It lets student to cerate their knowledge by publish their stuff, get a lot of feedbacks, reflect and revise their work and for teacher to scaffold this knowledge creation process.

2. Using hyperlinks students learn to make good argumentation for their statements as to check how others given hyperlinks support their claims – develops critical, analytical thinking.

3. Use of hyperlinks helps students begin to understand the relation and contextual basis of knowledge, knowledge construction.

4. By visiting multiply websites relevant to his/her topic to find information to which they will respond, critique or hyperlink, they build ever growing knowledge becoming subject-matter experts.

5. Very important thing is that visiting not only teacher’s or classmates’, but “outside” people blogs too in the same field of interest students can get tacit knowledge that are “spread” most of by storytelling. And storytelling is essential nature of blogging.

6. In traditional classroom not every student gets to share his/her thoughts. Bloggs allow all students to participate in discussion, opening up diverse perspectives, both: within and outside of the classroom.

http://www.bloger.com http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/matrix2.gif
http://www.schoolblogs.com

2005-12-09T08:03:00.000-08:00

Learning Blogs - the Activities in Elementary, Middle, High School

A blog as diary:

Each person would create his/her own blog. Despite that diary is very personal in education a teacher might use blogs in this way as strategy for helping middle school student to share their feelings about number of class issues in this way strengthening relationships between the two and may creative perspective in the individual student.

Bringing experts from outside:

Interact with expert or conduct interview. For example Sue Monk Kidd studied with her students novel “The Secret Life of Bees”, using weblog to carry on their conversation in the class, and invited the author of this book to join her students in their online discussion. It happened to be very interesting conversation between students and the author, bringing a lot of interesting information, which you could call tacit knowledge.

Collaborative:
Work collaborative with another class around globe.
What’s in a name – students explore the history of schools.

Brainstorm:

Pose problems and creation collections of ideas.
Name our new pet.

Persuade:

Ask students to make persuasive arguments
I want a lizard

Questions:

Get students involved with asking questions.
Meat we can eat?

Share students and teacher work:Word document.

You can found a lot more of activities and examples of use of the blogs in elementary, middle and high school here:

http://escrapbooking.com/blogging/tl.htm

Instructional Use of the Blogs in Elementary, Middle, and High School

2005-12-09T08:01:00.000-08:00

Instructional Use of the Blogs in Elementary, Middle, and High School

Professional portfolios

Staff weblog for discussion of schoolwide issues

Community weblogs involving parents and residents

Classroom management/homepages

Student/mentor collaborations

Class/group magazine

Content are portal

Learning journals

Team problem solving

For more examples look at
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/stories/storyReader$100

Instructional use of blogs in higher education

2005-12-09T07:52:00.000-08:00

Instructional use of blogs in higher education

Administration tool:
One of the most practical uses – to put class times, rules, syllabus, that can be updated very easily, from anywhere without using web authoring software. Students instead of writing e-mails could use it for asking every day questions

Weblog publishing:

Inherent nature of blogs allows for students easily publishing for
others. The blog as a publishing tool makes it happen without intervention of an editorial board or panel of reviewers. Peers’ and other readers’ criticisms, feedbacks quickly and easily could impact on as broadened understanding as future quality of published material too. Professor could assign to read a chunk of book and post two paragraphs of their thoughts on their reading

A blog for in-class discussions:

In college professor could set discussion questions every week and have people dabate it in comments. Or students could just visit each other blogs and discussing could discover their differences and similarities in non threatening way.

Organize class seminars:
Used in this way blogs become “group blogs”, authored by a group of people, where each student has to do weekly discussions on particular assigned reading and post their summaries.

Professor-written blogs:

They could cover interesting developments of the theme of the course. It is good way to make the issues that professor is covering more topical, linking to stories that will show the real world implications, bringing more fresh and up-to-date content.
On the other hand professor could share their ideas or process of research that they are doing, effectively modeling his/her approach and interest in his subject for students.

Students portfolios:

Many teacher s have found that weblogs are very efficient way for students to build electronic portfolios. These portfolios include original writing, links to resources, documents pictures, audio files, and video files. Automatically archiving older materials as new content is posted, weblogs lets easy develop and maintain e-portfolio over entire academic career. Enables to review progress, quickly republish and easily move copies form one grade portfolio to another grade.

Network of knowledge transfer:

Use of bloggs in higher education expands community of learning. Other comments with their own weblogs link into yours, read your reports, leave comments including links to their research, you follow those links and discover what there are doing and this can continue “ad infinitum” enhancing your learning dramatically.

http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm04/erm0450.asp
http://www.teachnology.org/stories/storyReader$150
http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml
http://www.weblogg-ed.com/stories/storyReader$100

Weblogs versus Learning Management System( LMS)

2005-12-08T16:01:00.000-08:00

Weblogs versus Learning Management System( LMS)

Comparing LMS such as WebCT, you can find a lot of advantages Weblogs v. LMS:

1. Using weblogs you can easily bring outside world to the classroom, when LMS is not open enough to connect to discourses outside of the class.
2. Weblogs offer personal web-publishing solution, when LMS is more focused on workflows and production.
3. the cost of rolling out a LMS is generally much higher than of supporting Manila server.
4. Support costs for LMS are significantly higher.
5. Training is much easier and less expensive for the weblog tools than for an LMS.
6. Acquisition and upkeep costs are much lower for weblogs tools such Manila

But LMS have advantage of fuller feature set designed specifically for teaching and learning as:

1. LMS provide integrate grade management tolls so that teacher could maintain course records and share them with students within LMS.
2. Within LMS faculty, students can carry on individual, group, or class discussions, when weblog tools are not as sophisticated in this are.

http://weblogs.design.fh-aachen.de/owrede/publikationen/weblogs_and_discourse
http://www.teachnology.org/stories/storyReader$150

Simple Explanation of RRS and it’s Use in Educational Blogging

2005-12-08T15:14:00.001-08:00

Simple Explanation of RRS and it’s use in educational blogging

RRS ( Rich Site Summary or Real simple Syndication) is changing the way we receive and process all the information we get from Internet.

Simple explanation:

Weblogs generate a behind-the-scenes code called XML. This code usually referred to us as “feed, makes possible for readers to “subscribe” the content created on particular Weblog. So they no longer have to visit the blog itself to get it. It is hard to check 20, 30 or more weblogs. The aggregator checks the sites you subscribe to, usually every hour and collects all the new content in a folder.

Use in education:

1. Teacher who has students create their own Weblogs can easily keep track on what those students are posting by subscripting to their students’ feeds.
2. Parents could “subscribe” to different feeds that are relevant to their children.
3. Librarian can be notified about new books released in the Amazon.com.
4. Teachers who want to stay current on the newest tools in educational technology just have to subscribe it :) and if any time anyone in “Weblog land” writes about that topic their will automatically know about it.
5. Distribution of learning content. Some universities are experimenting with the use of RSS to distribute learning objects and learning object metadata. This allows a learner to access resources from a wide variety of resources.

http://www.downes.ca/files/RSS_Educ.htm
http://www.infotoday.com/MMSchools/jan04/richardson.shtml

Software for educational blogging

2005-12-08T14:05:00.000-08:00

Software for educational blogging

The easiest way to start a Weblog is with one of the free service online:

The best known of the free services is: Blogger
Now more and more sites likes: moTime and
tBlog

If you want a little bit more power and you have some server space and tech support, you might want to consider:
Moveable Type or
Type Pad Both of which are free for schools too. In Moveable Type allows to set up a private blog viewable only by teacher and singular student, what lets to have a private means of feedback, as opposed to the blog open to the public.

If you want the power to build hundreds of sites for students and teachers with full-featured commenting and content management, you might consider:
Manila The annual license to run Manila on your server is 229$ and depending on how much server spaces you have, you can create and maintain thousands of multimedia Weblogs for your school community.

Theoretical issues

2005-12-08T11:25:00.000-08:00

My technology Project ended up as investigation on educational blogging, because I got interested to know more about that and because I do not have real audience that I would address my technology project to :)

Theoretical issues

I Connectivism
George Siemens in his article "Connectivism:A Learning Theory for the Digital Age" wrote that Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism were developed in a time when learning was not impacted trough technology. With development and use of technology new trends appeared in learning as:

 Technology is altering brains.
 Many of the process previously handled by learning theories can now be off loaded to, or supported by technology.
 Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where to find knowledge needed.
 Rapid increase of information creates environment where we cannot experience everything and just need to act without personal learning, drawing information from outside.
 Other people experience (other people) becomes “the surrogate for knowledge”.

A new learning theory - connectivism - addresses those new trends, stating that:

 Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
 Learning and knowledge rests, in diversity opinions.
 Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.
 Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is core skill.
 Decision-making is itself a learning process.

Instructors have to focus on more informal, connection-based, network-creating learning ecology.
Blogs, wikis and other open, collaborative platforms as two-way process, enables creation such learning ecology by (instead of presenting content/information/knowledge in a linear sequential manner) providing learners with a rich array of tools and information sources to use in creating their own learning pathways.

II Knowledge management – Storytelling-Blogging

Maish Michani, Venkat Gajamanicam in their article “Grassroots KM through blogging” talk about the “storytelling as the killer strategy and blogs as the killer technology”, because both of them “ share common ground: grassroots interaction”.
John Seely Brown talks about crucial role of storytelling strategy in knowledge management, because storytelling:

1. Helps us to understand how the world works.
2. Is a useful tool for capturing and disseminating TACIT knowledge!
3. Creates a memory framework.

For Stephan Down bologging is a form of storytelling, because:

 Bolgs are “pithy stories that are packed with a lot of tacit knowledge”. They let read us the mind of the bloggers, as feel him/her etc.

 Being highly personal and providing links to other site, articles, and other blogs, they have similar frameworks as stories for sharing information, meaning and knowledge.

 They give fully archived record of what other people have found in their browsing as allow getting point of view of a lot of smart people in varied fields.

http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm
http://www.elearningpost.com/features/archives/001009.asp