Tag: blogs

‘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

Hysterical blog graphic

http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/blob-blogWeb2.gif

Ginger at Almost Audacious IT ran a blog workshop aimed at faculty recently, for which she produced the above hysterical graphic. Ginger says “I just swiped the graphic from the classic ‘The Blob’ movie and did some magic on it in Flash by tracing the bitmap. ” The ‘just’ sounds a bit modest to me – this perfectly captures the frenzied pitch that has accompanied a lot of the blog hype of late. – SWL

Living in Parallel Worlds: Blogs and Course Management Systems

http://www.syllabus.com/news_issue.asp?
id=155&IssueDate=11/12/2003

Blogs are ‘outside’ the CMS. Should they be? There’s really two questions here. One involves the functionality involved in creating and maintaing a blog, what we typically think of as the blog software itself. Should this remain outside the CMS? No, it’s an obvious candidate for inclusion and you should expect to see it in a CMS near you soon. The second, far more interesting question, one that actually doesn’t seem to be asked in the article, is whether student blog content should remain inside the walled off ‘silos’ as a few have called them, or whether they should be out in the wild like all the rest of the blogs. This is a far thornier issue, and in my experience gets to the heart of some of the resistance to using blogs that I’ve seen so far. – SWL

Now that’s a trip report!

http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/
2003/11/techlearn_trip_.html

Mark Oehlert lets us know that Michael Parmentier’s notes from the recent TechLearn 2003 are now online. Having tried to produce conference notes myself, I am awed at the thoroughness and real usefulness of these notes. One can actually get a sense of what each of the speakers was focused on, and even an overall sense of the conference. A great model to emulate in the future. – SWL

Archive of ETUG BLogtalk Typepad site

http://www.edtechpost.ca/blogtalk_archive/

Prompted by Alan’s generous references in his latest Blogshop to last month’s B.C. Educational Technology User’s Group online ‘blogtalk’ and his links to materials there that will soon disappear when I disable the Typepad account, I’ve posted an archived version of the site here.

Until someone tells me to take it down, this is probably the better spot to link to if you want to refer to any of that material. Note this is not all *my* material – I’m just hosting the archives, but if you link to any of the materials please make an effort to find out who the original author of the piece you are linking to was and credit them directly.
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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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Perseus Blog Survey Results Unsurprising

http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/

This one is quickly making the rounds. It would be easy to criticize this survey (only focuses on hosted services, and even then excludes, for instance, the radio.weblogs.com sites) but I actually think their findings would be generally supported if you widened the set of sites and software you looked at. It is entirely unsurprising to me that there is a huge abadonment rate with new blogs – how many times have you downloaded a piece of software simply to check it out, especially ones that are free or have free trials? Same goes for the finding that ‘active’ blogs are on avergae not that active. Creating a blog site’s not hard – regularly maintaining an interesting blog, now that’s a bit more of a challenge!
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Welcome to the newly designed EdTechPost

There’s still lots to do, but for a number of reasons I needed to finally get this out the door today. It may not look that different, but to get this going I’ve:

  • moved from using Radio as my blogging tool to using MoveableType
  • changed web hosts, and got myself a brand-spanking new URL
  • redesigned the site, both visually and through the use of CSS

There’s still some kinks to work out in the style sheet implementations (I hadn’t quite realized how truly inconsistent the interpretation of “standards” is still across browsers) so please be patient. If you do notice anything going truly squirrelly for you, please let me know. There’s also still a good deal of work to try and re-direct traffic from the old site to here, but from here on I will be publishing strictly to this server/this url/this RSS feed. So welcome! – SWL