I decided to summarise the articles into this post and copy the urls as an aid to future work. I think the examples given in the reading materials are quite exciting and show to what levels the use of blogs as aid to learning and community building can develop.
It is interesting to note the existence of sites such as using weblogs in education. However most of the examples seem to be american leaving me to wonder what is curently happening in this country.
A. Blogging and RSS.
1. News and events as exampled by Lewis Elementary School. This site shows how complex a blog based site can become. It was developed using movable type which might be something we could look at.
2. Archiving and publishing of material.
3. Collaborative ventures as evidenced by The secret life of Bees . This also shows how a blog can be used to communicated with the parents. The site ...book club shows possible a way of communicating that removes the need for email. This may have major benefits for univeristies with a high number of international students.
4. Knowledge management in the form of reflective journals as in the Pam pritchard example. I like the idea of digital portfolios or just digital filing cabinets and wonder whether there are big gains to be made here for providing such tools to all students. The use of a blog as a repository of resources when undertaking an essay seems extremely valid.
The possibilities for collaboration seem endless although I think care must be taken not to endanger the issues of accesibility, privacy and security.
B. Emerging Technologies
The second article is interesting in that it talks about the difference between first-generation tools e.g. WebCT, etc. and second-generation tools into which it places blogs and wikis. It has links to some interesting sites which tend to re-iterate the ways in which Blogs can be used e.g.Weblogs for Use with ESL Classes which differentiates the uses for Tutor, learner and class.
I think some of the examples here show how blogs can become generic and how they can lose focus for all but the interested, a factor that must be remembered when using them to drive community based ideas. So for example the site Journalism 1 at HCRHS was engaging the sites jim burber on Call and instapundit had interesting layouts but content wise did not hold my attention.
There sems to be quite a lot of material on RSS but while I understand the idea as an agregator I have yet to see how it fits in with the total concept.
Software
Blog software seems to be quite numerous. Other than blogger.com there is also Movabletype
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2 comments:
Moveable type - and Manila ( http://manila.userland.com/ ) both seem to have more features than Blogger - but you have to have server space for them - and they are not free.
I agree that there are comparatively few examples of Blogs in the UK, though I hope that you have now seen what Warwick are doing ( http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/ ), as well as the JISc funded RAMBLE project that Terry mentioned in her blog ( http://ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ ).
BECTA - who deal with schools, only seem to have 1 reference to Blogs on their site: http://www.becta.org.uk/corporate/publications/documents/family%20learning%20good%20practice%20guide.pdf - though searching the Virtual Teacher Discussion boards there shows that they are starting to be used: http://forum.ngfl.gov.uk/
Emma - thanks for the comment I had looked at the Warwick site but not posted anything to my blog commenting on it, something I meant to do at the time because it was quite impressive.
I'll look at the other one which I missed - a problem in webct when the title of the posting are not changed to reflect the post.
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