Blogging Pedagogy

Check out this piece by Joseph Ugoretz at Academic Commons about how to use social software in the classroom. He reviews some social software services such as Furl, Flickr, and Wikipedia, and then provides some ideas about how to use them in the classroom. Ugoretz provides some interesting ideas about how to apply these tools. He suggests:

- Publishing opportunities at sites such as wikipedia

"when a student's work is published, in a forum which is open and has the potential to attract acclaim and attention (whether positive or negative), the responsibility for the quality, efficacy and accuracy of that work is deepened."

- Evaluating and comparing these tools

"Testing different resources one against the other, and against the students' own experience and prior knowledge, can help them to explore the questions of authority, and introduce and reward a healthy skepticism as well as the critical thinking skills which college students (and all media consumers in contemporary society) desperately need."

-Evaluating sources while doing research

"Students need to know, and must internalize, the difference, for example, between an article in a medical journal and the opinion of a member of an online community. They need to learn how to judge and apply reputation points, or recognizable standards of reliability. They need to see the way that a ratemyprofessor.com rating can work on a real human being, whether a student considering a course, or a professor teaching a course. They need to think about how these posts come about, and why and from whom, so that they will come to understand the rule of the extremes (reviews come from people who are very pleased, or very displeased—the middle is often excluded)."

-Serendipity

"these tools can work in the classroom setting to promote and reward a feature of learning which is too often absent in the classroom. Serendipity (I would argue), is at the heart of any learning which hopes to produce commitment and permanent attachment. Serendipity, chance encounters, the lucky strike, and the joy of discovery are feelings that every successful learner has experienced."

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