Tag: edublogging

Blogging Skills

Some Thoughts about Assessing EduBlogs

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How should educators approach assessment for edublogs?

I would say that it depends on many factors, but one crucial question to ask is whether you plan to assess learners in terms of process or product. It also depends on the learning space you design for learners.

Some intial thoughts:

For a private blog, in which you are invited by a learner as an observer, assessment might take the form of a couple of pause-points throughout the course, in which you ask a series of guiding questions to prompt learners to engage in their own self-assessment.

For an autonomous blog, a learner might be assessed based on a combination of checklists (identifying tasks accomplished within the learner’s sandbox, for example). It might involve a self-reflective post, based on a rubric, or it could involve peer review, in which the learner chooses the peer to review/critique their work. In some cases, such bloggers might choose to be assessed by the instructor, and enter into a dialogue prior to the assessment about what will be in fact evaluated.)

For anonymous blogging activities, one assessment activity could be to involve learners in a peer discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of the process, the nature of the individual learners’ interactions, and follow this up with a self-assessment, evaluating one’s own, as well as the group’s, participation.

For therapeutic, or transformational blogging, one might argue the assessment by others might not be appropriate. perhaps giving learners choices in how they want to be evaluated, could make it more meaningful for them. Contributions could be self-assessed in terms of a rubric. Learners could engage in pause-points, or participate in focus groups to discuss their overall experiences. In such blogging spaces, item-based evaluation might seem picky and counter-productive. Frequency of posts, length, type of content, etc., might be a consideration, if only the learner chooses to apply it in their evaluation schemes, but do so in consultation with their instructor.

These are some preliminary ideas on assessment. I would appreciate any feedback on these ideas.

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Reflections on Strategies for Cultivating a Sharing Circle

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Background

These are reflections on my work online beginning the development of a personal learning/sharing circle, which consists of a group of learners who voluntarily interact and dialogue with another without the conventional framework of a course. For me, the most important difference between developing a network of academic contacts, and developing the more intensely meaningful connections indicative of a sharing circle, is that the nature of the peer interaction is more supportive, more personal, and ultimately broader in scope than those interactions between peers in ordinary semester-length classes.

Over the past few months, I have engaged in autonomous blogging, and have engaged in a number of dialogues  and conversations Interactions within Me2U with peers I have worked with in previous classes, peers also taking independent studies, my advisor, subject matter experts external to Me2U, and bloggers from outside academia.

I am reflecting on various strategies for individuals who have gained their status as autonomous bloggers to extend their network further, and I want to begin an exploration of my own motivations as a learner that underlies the act of broadening one’s scope and range of blogging to include a wider and wider circle of peers, of co-contributors. George Siemens identified the idea that blogging is like a pause-point, and then extended the purpose to extended, parallel conversations. This is the crucial distinction between autonomous blogging, and pesonal blogging, where one extends the circle of concern from addressing the needs of the audience of the utilitarian (self) – the one, to addressing the needs of the social self as a participant in wider circles.

I want to emphasize that a sharing circle need not involve active, deliberate interaction; the interaction may or not be reciprocal. That is, I consider the act of adding a bloggers’ RSS to one’s own aggregator as much a part of the process of cultivating spokes within one’s sharing/learning circle, as engaging in extended conversations over time with one individual in a synergistic, reciprocal relationship, participating in parrallel conversations.

Connective Reading:
TrackBacks, Tagging, Shared Bookmarks, and Subscribing to RSS Blog Feeds

Another way to initiate connection between oneself and another blogger is to post a response as a trackback, which essentially involves linking to others’ blog posts. Through this way, I have been able to identify that on several occasions authors do follow up on the trackbacks. On several occasions, Trackbacks initiated visits from authors to my EduBlogging for Educators blog. However, few of these authors have followed up with replies to posts. Yet I have begun to recognize that activity occurs despite there being no dirct comments to posts.

I found the act of adding tags to my posts as useful, as I found that when I did online searches based on keywords and tags, I was able to pinpoint sites of other bloggers who are writing about similar topics. In addition, once I found useful links, I added them to my delicious bookmarks, and added annotated notes, tags and categories to aid me with finding them later as needed.

Another indirect way to establish indirect connections with others is to subscribe and follow to their RSS feeds and add them to a blog aggregator, or RSS reader, such as BlogLines.

Connective Writing:
Reading, Commenting, and Building Ideas

One example of a successful strategy of cultivating a spoke of my expanding sharing circle was to read and follow bloggers’ ideas, and comment on them. In one case, my comment to Jennifer Jones’ post about her reflections on the idea of middlespace. This led to a discussion on the issues surrounding anonymous blogging, and the purposes for blogging, in which several bloggers contributed, and which contributed to further refining the use of middle-space as an edublogging metaphor.

Discussion Thread URL: http://www.jentropy.com/archives/351

Thus, reading and commenting thoughtfully on others’ blog posts has also led to interaction with experts, including Barbara Ganley, Tony Bates and Terry Anderson. I had received a number of private emails by authors of blogs, in response to comments I had posted.

For me, the commenting on ideas of individual posters on their own blogs was a great way to introduce myself to these authors, to engage them on their own terms, in their own blogging spaces, and open a dialogue with them. This is especially true for those bloggers whose blogs play a recording or informing role, rather than a social/networking one. It is important to note that sometimes a blogger does not interact using their blog with their audience, instead choosing what is, for them, the more personal technology of e-mail. Thus, a crucial strategy for encouraging interaction with others and faciltating a sharing/learning circle, is to provide numerous options for interaction, not just through one’s own blog, or through the blogs of others.

Examples

One example of a successful networking activity that led to a number of interactions and the growth of several spokes to the learning/sharing circle involved the creation and sharing of useful content. I developed a number of contacts with my new posterous.com e-portfolio site, in which I posted a number of podcasts, an image of the transformative learning cycle, and a document outlining edublogging roles. I have been able to track the number of views of these learning objects, and this is, for me, the most promising potential tools, incombination with the Me2U and the netizenship blogs, for developing further contacts and relationships among online peers.
One example of an unsuccessful networking activity that took much of my time was my contributions to a fledgling online learning community for BC literacy practitioners. I think that the timing played a major factor in how many replies I had received to posts. For example, within the BC Literacy Forum, I posted a number of blog posts, and created an edublogging group, yet had no interaction among members. However, there tends to be a flurry of short-term activity following an online event. I had done an elluminate presentation within the BC Literacy Forum, received some posts and interaction, which then declined soon afterwards. The coupling of a blogging thread with an event online has been a successful strategy on two occasions over the past year.  After the CIDER presentation given online on September 9th, on the topic of edublogging roles and metaphors, there were a number of visits to the posterous.com portfolio, and several visitors listened to the podcasts.

reflections on theory

Confessional EduBlogging – Exploring Issues

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Is there a place for encouraging self-disclosure of this sort in an educational setting?

Is formal education ready to allow for confessional disclosure of interactions between students and their instructors? How would full transparency change educational dialogue?

 

There are many bloggers dumping their intimate thoughts onto the blogosphere – to seek exposure, to vent, and for a number of other less-than virtuous reasons.

From the outset, I argue that there is no place in education to encourage such irresponsible blogging. The role of an educator is to act as moderator and provide guidance to beginner bloggers to prevent problems from arising. Vengeful, hateful confessional blogging violates students’ rights. It makes learners and instructors vulnerable.

 Many issues surrounding confessional blogging is discussed in this post, as well as the comments that follow:

http://paintedbridequarterly.wordpress.com/2009/03/22/confessional-blogging/

However, educators do need to address the issue of transparency and privacy for student bloggers, giving learners examples of good and bad examples of confessional blogs, and encouraging discussion and debate. Decency, respect, reciprocity, integrity, and other virtues, need to be upheld by educators and their students within an edublogging environment. Poor blogging practices can be examined, and serve as examples for learners on what not to do.

The type of confessional edublogging I would like to consider as a legitimate topic for instruction refers to the creation of a personal diary shared with a few others, in which personal learning processes and impressions are recorded to track events, and map a person’s learning journey over time. It is entirely public in nature.

 An example of a teacher’s confessional blog:

http://teacherconfessional.wordpress.com/

A big question arises about privacy – many educators would feel somewhat concerned if everything they pass on to their students is possibly content made public by their students. Many students would be taken aback if the feedback they received about a paper was made public knowledge by their instructors. It is because the potential for misinterpretation is so high. Transparency of interactions between learners and their instructors would change the nature of instruction. It would possibly usher in a completely different set of rules of conduct, with drastically different expectations.  

Edublogging would shift the dialogue, and would rework the entire conversation. Although there is high potential for miscommunications, misunderstandings, and distortions between students and educators, the educators and the students would recognize the need for clearer thought, for more concise messages, and pay closer attention to tone, to phrasing of ideas, and an entirely different set of performance skills (negotiation of impressions and identity) would be practised. within edublogging learning spaces.

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EduBlogging for Formal Institutions vs. EduBlogging for Lifelong Learning

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At TechTicker, the author, Mike Bogle, wrote about the challenge of educational change and his opening paragraph outlines the conundrum:

Participatory culture is significant because of its capacity to connect people, facilitate dialogue and cultivate the growth of a free-flowing landscape. This culture is built upon flexibility and freedom, as well as the capacity for individuals to “transcend their immediate surroundings to engage in a wider, more complex world.”  He explained that although this is a great thing from the standpoint of individuals, it does not really transfer the benefits to the level of organizations.

Bogle goes on: “…a shadow economy of learning and teaching has emerged outside standing structures rather than growing in symbiosis within them.”  There now exists a “…thriving network of activity and exploration that largely fails to trickle back to institutions.”

I am intrigued by his question: “Is education destined to be constantly in conflict with itself, with individuals and guerilla groups moving as rogue factions beneath the radar of traditional systems – if not breaking from the traditional model altogether?”

To the extent that formal education serves corporate masters, and designs curriculum geared to preparing learners only for jobs, and to the extent that education is synonomous with the techno-rational claims that all learning is observable as products, and that successful demonstration of learning outcomes equals mastery, then the gap will grow wider and wider to become a chasm.

Take the instance of educational blogging. Blogging within traditional models of education are consistently inadequately meeting expectations of the educators, and generating a ever larger group of reluctant, anxious bloggers. It could be argued that the large majority of edublogs serve the interests of the educators, and in turn are serving the needs of the institutions.  The students come second. Rationalizations abound about preparing students for the workplace, for life, etc. Undoubtedly. However, students are not asked how they want to use blogging to learn….for themselves.

 

What is considered important in blogging? Social interaction. Presence. Posting. Commenting, Reflecting, Summarizing – all activities led by the instructor. How much consideration is given to the learners’ identities? What if educators started first with the premise that learners capacities for engagement in a participatory culture mattered most? How might the educator generate more participation from learners? What is in fact participation? Are students inclined to participate with others? Or work independently? Formal education has a tremendous resonsibility for cultivating the skills for effective engagement in the new era of connected learning.

Once learners transition through becoming self-directed learners within formal education requiring support from faculty and engage most of their activity in autonomous learning activity via blogging, or social networking, they have developed the required skills for auto-didactic learning, determining the objectives, mode of assessment, resources and instructional strategies, and mentors/peers to accomplish their own learning goals. EduBlogging is as much concerned about providing the support and mentoring to reach autonomous learner status, as it is with what happens afterward, when learners engage in lifelong learning. As a technology, edu-blogging offers learners sustained, lifelong control over the means for their learning, independent of learning institution, and the implications of this have long-term, dramatically disruptive implications for formal education. Edu-Blogging provides the means for independent learning at a much higher caliber than ever offered before, providing learners with the option to study as cognitive apprentices with reputable, professional educators. The role of the autonomous educators of the future will grow and strengthen as more and more student bloggers acquire the skills to become independent of formal institutions, and instead seek to engage educators of high social capital.

The “rogue” educators, the edupunk movement, the visionaries, offer possibilities. The connectivism courses are extraordinary – they are challenging the limits of the definition of traditional formal education, shaking things up.

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Purposes for EduBlogging

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Blogging is a different approach; the classroom is one space that blogging can occur for learners; the emphasis, however, needs to be to invite learners to step out of their well-worn shoes as students, and determine what they want to write, why, and for whom. If blogging is used by teachers to reinforce the rules of conduct and the power relationship that exists in classrooms, then blogging as a strategy will fail. period. Why blog for your teacher, writing what your teacher wants? Why learn these skills when the act of writing makes you vulnerable to others’ scrutiny?

Bloggers blog for their own reasons; not for grades, not to complete their assignments.
Bloggers don’t consciously say that they are going to blog to develop their academic writing skills, or cultivate their social skills. Why expect our students to be persuaded to blog to attain these goals?

Learners need to gradually move their zone of comfort to a liminal zone, a place of transition, and rely on a group of trusted others for support. Learner autonomy is developed gradually as their net efficacy grows, as does their self efficacy in general. The learning is a pendulum: a swinging back and forth between the blogger as self-reflective, and the blogger as an embedded self. Self-reflective blogging requires learners to engage in an internal dialogue made explicit through text, with one’s own voice as a vehicle for self-expression. An embedded self is more aware of the impact of others’ perspectives, is more analytical, and blogs to engage in a broader conversation with oneself and others. Such bloggers enjoy expressing ideas, and enjoy receiving a series of comments from trusted others, and then is positively challenged to engage in re-incorporating these ideas, reflecting on them, and reiterating the ideas in more complex ways.

Encouraging attitudinal shifts in learners is what will bring about the boost in confidence and motivation in learners to blog.