James Farmer Presentation

Jame's Weblog

Today's Presentation

Original Paper

James talks about how Weblogs and other tools can effect a "Community of Inquiry."

Communication environments:

Traditional face-to-face distinguished from new media.

Collaboration can occur in many ways in a classroom model, but the large lecture hall scenario is not very conducive to collaboration. The "corridors" of an institute can provide opportunities for students to collaborate.

TV broadcasts are not interactive without sophisticated video conferencing equipment. Email, listservs and discussions boards are examples of internet based communications.


Discussion board environments provide a large degree of anonymity for the most part. Is it possible to develop cognitive abilities in this type of environment? Participants must continually check the discussions to see what others have to say, which requires a certain amount of effort and may hinder participation and the development of a community of inquiry or a social presence.

Some comments from session participants related to discussion boards:

Cold empty shells
Very linear
Never used alone
Used for journaling
Yahoo groups are supplemented by email and RSS as well.


Weblogs:

Weblog posts can be summarized by RSS and things (metadata) like the title, date of publication, and description of the postings can be captured in an RSS feed.

Weblogs are organic and unmanaged like the Web itself.

Weblogs allow for comments related to postings and trackback links, which both facilitate communication and the building of community.

Weblogs are typically "owned" by an individual, although there are group Weblogs as well.

As related to virtual learning environments, weblogs can exist within the environment or aggregated into the environment.

Another model involves students aggregating weblogs on their own as well as there being a "class" aggregation.

Weblogs are empowering because they are owned by individuals and are a manifestation of that person's persona.

Weblogs can be used for sustained reflection like a diary or journal, but the social nature of aggregation, comments and trackback adds extra value. Track back makes it easy to follow what others are saying about specific topics.

Students often subscribe to the teacher's feed or the teacher can automate the subscription for their students within a learning environment.

Where to from here - open source options.

Drupal is an open source learning environment that includes Weblogging.

WordPress MU makes it easy to provide weblogs for multiple users, maybe even every student should the institute go that way.

School Tool provides more administrative tools for managing a school or classroom.

Open Discussion:

Weblogs are potentially a transforming technology in education, but is there evidence that this is happening?

Easy for the teacher to find themselves becoming too controlling on what students publish.

Institutions are often not on-side because of a fear of loosing control, but James feels that conversations with other teachers, administrators, the IT department and the public can help overcome this fear.

A good place to start with students is in reflective journaling. Another example has the teacher providing students with open ended questions and students providing reflective answers in their blogs.