Tag Archives: blogs

Blogging as e-Portfolio

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Jeff

  • Power of open portfolios: blogs are public and allow comments from professionals in the field
  • Blogs are portable, can be carried after graduation

Carla:

  • Paradigm shift
  • work on teaching philosophy throughout the program, not just all at once at the end

Problems

  • technology entry level was too high with Dreamweaver – weekly support needed
  • Private Web space = no conversation, no visibility, diminished opportunities

Blogs as portfolio was a solution that just “fit”

First-year students blogging

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  • among the objectives in the class – using the media?
  • wikipedia is like porn in the minds of first-year students. result of what they’ve been taught in high school.
  • part of the wikipedia exercise – improve articles based on further research
  • different expectations for college written communication
  • one powerful feature of blogs – a way to expand critical discussion outside the classroom (or content or defined activities in a digital classroom)
  • broadening student participation for students who are intimidated to speak up in class. I can see a parallel even online – students may feel shy or restrained in some way in a class or group discussion, but when publishing in their own space, they may explore topics in a different way.
  • Uses Pipes to construct rss feed for the whole class.
  • Students must be made aware of the public nature of blogs – only share what you’re comfortable with! They do get more comfortable with it as they see their fellow students’ writing.
  • There is a rubric based on Bloom’s digital taxonomy that can be used to grade blogs
Challenges
  • getting students to tag correctly
  • participation
  • due dates needed
  • “the Facebook effect” – students expect it to be easy

TLT Symposium 2009

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Blogging – I largely focused on the Penn State Blogs in this year’s Symposium. I am looking at them in the context of their potential application in the iMBA program, and I see enormous potential for the platform, with many potential strengths and applications, including:

    • enabling reflections – blogging is a great way to allow in-depth reflection on a topic, increasing student retention and engagement.
    • enabling conversations – blogs can be easily aggregated into a single source, essentially allowing conversations to occur around a single topic or course.
    • student ownership of content – ANGEL supports discussion forums, chat and other forms of communication that can work in certain situations but ultimately do not give students ownership of their content. That carefully composed discussion forum posting or drop box submission that took a lot of thought and effort to create is essentially lost when the semester/term is over unless the student takes special effort to retain it.
    • portfolio – related to ownership of content, the concept of blog as portfolio has powerful implications. The Penn State Blog platform can be used to support so much more than just blogging; essentially a student can easily set up a whole Web site with a collection of artifacts (pictures, stories, etc.) related to him or herself. The portfolio can represent not only the students’ learning in the program but can include any learning or experiences that take place outside of the formal learning environment. Such an e-portfolio is a strong indicator to a potential employer of the depth of a person’s strengths and experiences.

The two sessions I went to related to blogging were entitled: Engaging Students with Program Learning Outcomes and ENGL 202C on the Blogs at Penn State Platform. I learned of real-life examples that support my thinking above. The Engaging Students session had students that were using their blogs in the context of a program experience and not just for isolated classwork. They were doing all the things I mentioned above for portfolio, but were also using them for reflections and conversations. The ENGL 202C students were able to share their writing with the class in a much more meaningful and engaging way.

I also attended a session on the future of textbooks in the digital age and a hands-on session on Adobe Connect. The textbook session gave a lot of food for thought about what’s in store for textbooks and what copyright means in the digital world. The Adobe Connect session gave me more hands-on practice with Connect and informed me of the detailed help page PSU has in place for the product – I intend to use this as a reference and source of ideas as I revise our own (World Campus) instructions for Elluminate Live.

Finally, the two keynotes with David Wiley and danah boyd were fantastic. All in all a tiring day but very well worth my time and as usual, gave me plenty of takeaways and food for thought.