Blogging Pedagogy

(reposted from sleeping alone and starting out early)

If we're going to think seriously about how to use blogs as tools for teaching and learning, it seems to me that it may be useful to differentiate between crafting a successful blogpost, developing a successful blog, and being a skilled blogger.

I'm hoping to crowdsource some brainstorming about the pedagogical potential of blogging on learning. Lately, in my work with Dan Hickey's 21st Century Assessment Project, I've been thinking tons about how integrating blogging in the writing classroom might build a rich new media learning environment that focuses on a wide range of literacy practices. I've started a provisional list below but am hoping that others (most importantly for me, people who have worked with blogs in their classrooms) can offer ideas for additions to this list.

Here's an article that appeared in the New York Times today about professors who are using blogs, social networking sites and the like in an attempt to "humanize" themselves for their students. Some also see this as a response to websites like Ratemyprofessor.com. The article's interesting, but doesn't really discuss what these sorts of issues mean for graduate student instructors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/20/fashion/20professor.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

As I understand it, one of the great triumphs of the software industry was to let users create their own communities - where they often found and corrected bugs and other technical issues before the company did. As a result, the user had a hand in defining the product and its use.

I find that a similar thing has developed with my class blog. I assigned a number of blog posts about the class reading. These posts were due before class and were meant to provide material for class discussion as well as compel students to actually do the reading.

The founder of PostSecret is coming to campus November 1. In my RHE 309K, we talked about PostSecret quite a lot. As a community art project, it interestingly updates 60s and 70s mail art. I'm also interested in how it uses a blog as a public art space, and how it constructs its public.

Google Books has introduced a new feature that allows users to embed clips from books that are out of copyright directly into their webpages. All you have to do is click on the box graphic in the toolbar above the book, then highlight the area you want to embed. When you are done, a popup window with the embed code will appear.

This could be an interesting feature to use for class blogging—if you want your students to discuss a portion of a text, you can embed it directly to the blog for them to view. I’m sure people will think up lots of other uses for the feature as they become more accustomed to it.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring a Digital Media and Learning Competition, and I'm thinking that Blogging Pedagogy should apply for some monies. There is $2 million available, and there are two types of Awards: Innovation and Knowledge-Networking. I'm thinking that BP could apply for a Knowledge-Networking award. Here is a description of what they're looking for:

The field of digital media and learning has already produced a number of brilliant ideas that deserve wider dissemination, circulation, discussion, translation, application, articulation, and customization. Not every inventor/developer is a good knowledge-networker. Knowledge-networking takes good ideas and circulates them widely, taking full advantage of the Web's potential for collaborative thinking. It enables communication in which many can contribute, shape, and share.

If you use blogs in your courses (as I do--for reading responses), here's something to think about:
Blog Overload.

Thanks to Jim Aune at the Blogora for posting Iranian President Ahmadinejad's blog.

We saw this a lot during the 2004 U.S. Presidential campaign too - politicians blogging and "communicating with the people." During the campaign, my students looked at political blogs like Daily Kos and Little Green Footballs, but they also looked at blogs on www.georgewbush.com and www.johnkerry.com. It's interesting to read through these and speculate about who's actually authoring the posts, who the audience is, and whether it's a way to do an end around on the Press.

Some changes are on the way for Blogging Pedagogy. We've upgraded to Drupal 4.7, which means some new functions. It also means that we will soon have a new look (which, in my opinion, is long overdue).

Here are a couple of things you might notice right away

1) Regular visitors to the site may have noticed the "Tags" section on the left-hand side of the page. In the past, people posting to the site chose from a list of categories that best described their post. With our new "free tagging" function, bloggers can type in any "tag" they'd like. Tags are keywords that describe a post, and any number of tags can be entered by a blogger (separated by commas). You can use a tag someone has already used, or you can invent your own. The Tags section to the left is known as "tag cloud." Larger text indicates that a lot of posts fall into that category (notice the largest tag is "general pedagogy" - it seems that most people have stayed with this tag since it used to be the default), smaller text means that fewer posts use that tag. You'll notice that I've tagged this entry with "blogging" (a tag that has been used previously) and "administrative" (a tag that I just created).