‘Blogs in Education’ roundtable discussion topics

http://www.edtechpost.ca/gems/
etug_roundtable/roundtable_discussion_topics.htm

Tomorrow the B.C. Ed Tech Users Group gets together for its bi-annual face to face sessions. I’m hosting a short half-hour discussion on blogs in education, in part as a follow up to the online ‘blogtalk’ we did back in October. The roundtables are just supposed to be loose discussions but I threw together two possible topics, as well as pointers to a few examples of higher ed class blogs that I like. If anyone has comments on pointers to where these discussions have already taken place online (specifically the ‘inside or outside the firewall’ one) I’d love to hear them.

The only problem with doing this roundtable is that I’m going to miss the other ones that are going on at the same time, most notably Brian’s on wikis in education. As always, feel free to re-use if there’s anything useful here.- SWL

B.C. Educational Technology Users Group ‘Blogtalk’

http://etugblog.typepad.com/blogtalk/

Today is officially the last day so I can finally let the cat out of the bag for those who haven’t seen this yet.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, for the past two weeks I’ve been helping to facilitate, along with 4 other educators from B.C., an ‘online discussion’ on possible uses of blogs in education for the B.C. Educational Technology Users Group (ETUG). Many of you will recognize at least one of the other facilitators, Brian Lamb from UBC…
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Matrix of some uses of blogs in education

This week and next I’m helping to facilitate an online discussion on the use of blogs in education for about 400 members from the B.C.-wide Educational Technology Users Group.

We are facilitating the discussion through a multi-author Typepad blog (there are 4 other facilitators involved). We’ve structured the sessions to begin with an introduction to what blogs are and how to read and write them. We’re now moving into Day 4 and from hereon we get into far more interesting stuff – what are the actual applications of blogs in education. It is a very diverse group of participants ranging widely across job descriptions, disciplines and skill sets.

To help facilitate this discussion and my own thinking on it, I’ve worked up this matrix of some of the possible uses of blogs in education.
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Pathways to Philosophy Distance Learning Program

http://www.shef.ac.uk/~ptpdlp/index.html

The home page for this ‘open education’ program had a number of elements that made me take note. One is the ‘Letters to my former students‘ in which the instructor has constructed a kind of FAQ section based on the responses he’s written to student emails over the past 6 years of teaching the course. Another is the archive of student essays, exhibiting exemplary work from past years. While there may be some privacy issues at stake regarding the publishing student work, it would seem that the work of previous classes is one obvious source of materials in building up both a program’s knowledge base, as well as its set of examples of how people have come to learn the materials previously. – SWL

CADE 2003 Photos and Proceedings now online

Very quietly both the proceedings and some images from the last conference for the Canadian Association of Distance Educators (CADE) have been posted to their site. At least it was quiet to me as I had to find out about it by finding a copy of my own paper whilst googling for a good K-12 course management site (anyone??). Luckily, now that I’ve found this I can forever cherish this photo of me talking to the elearning guru 😉

(Michelle, you thought we were joking about getting groupie shots at Merlot eh?)

Educational Software and Learning: Subversive Use and Volatile Design

Discussions about the use of information and communications technology (ICT) based learning environments often assume that use is defined, or at least severely constrained, by the inherent intentions of the designer. However, typical uses of educational software involve a subversion of the designer’s intentions to match contextual needs.

Via a post in James Farmer’s weblog comes reference to this interesting paper, originally presented by David Squires in 1999 to the International Conference on System Sciences. Anyone who has ever actively supported a CMS in an educational setting (or any software for that matter) will agree – one can simply never predict all of the uses that both instructors and students will find for software.

(As an aside – a recent favourite hack I heard of with WebCT was an instructor who was using the file upload/download capabilities to send audio messages to his students that he recorded on his desktop with a simple mic setup – instant voicemail system! Maybe obvious to you, but I hadn’t thought of it and the software’s not specifically designed with this in mind.)

This paper goes deeper than that, though, arguing for a design process that accomodates such ‘subversive use’ of the technologies. One thing I think is missing here, and often missed in the debates on the effects of media types on instruction is the fact that a distinct characteristic of web-based applications/content is the ability to record (and aggregate and ‘playback’) *how* the software/content is being used. Putting aside for a second the big-brotherish aspect, this seems to me to point at a new source of design data – a way for designers to see, after the fact, how their design intentions are interpreted/mis-interpreted, used/mis-used and to make changes accordingly. – SWL