Looking at Blogs through new educator glasses

I have a newly discovered reverence for blogging in education now. I think I was stuck in the early blogs era that had too much of the look and appeal of personal journaling and opinion spouting for me to consider it being a good educator's tool. However, due to the research and exploration from Denvy’s assignment prompts, I discovered four (major) new understandings of blogs in education today:

• there are very interesting, exciting, progressive and information-filled blogs created by educators for educators

• there are some very interesting, exciting, progressive and information-filled blogs created by educators for students (even in higher education – my platform)

• there are some really cool student-created blogs that example assignment ideas (that most notably do not impose additional reading and assessment time for instructors)

• there are ever-improving and very cool blog tools, widgets, design plug-ins (that you classmates!) that assist both educators and students in creating blogs that can be a very rich environment for learning

Although one still needs to wade through sea of poorly designed, hot-air soap-box styled, and catch-all blog-because-I-can blogs, I can continue to visit the great blogs that I’ve found and be confident that if I continue to explore and search for rich content-filled blogs I, fellow faculty, and my students can learn from, that I will in fact find many.

Concurrently with this course, I also worked on learning how to write CSS code that makes creating a blog from scratch fairly easy. I also took an information design course that has helped me learn how to design information based on goals and messages. I can now take the best information of all the great blogs and design a blog that delivers what I promise it will – rewarding it’s readers. My future students will also benefit from my new knowledge and experience in:

• searching for
• reading
• subscribing
• designing
• posting

Thank you Denvy and classmates! Aloha!

Good blogging stories - mini resumés?

The fact that bloggers have advanced their lives in some way due to

- creating a blog
- posting to a blog
- commenting on a blog

didn't surprise me. What did, was that there was a blog post where bloggers shared stories of how they felt a virtual blog or blogging gave them a real-life opportunity that advanced their careers or education. Okay, maybe it's not all that surprising that it was there - maybe the surprise is in just that, I found it.

Just a few good stories that came out of blogging (click here):

I actually am not surprised at all about these kinds of experiences coming out of blogging. I can't tell you how many times I discovered a website, an educator, a program, a tool, and megabytes of information after visiting a blog.

And much that happened in my work (BT before teaching) came from what might be considered a precursor to blogging - the online discussion board (DB).

My good story:

I was hired as a beta-tester and expert to assist users in how to use desktop editing software (motion graphics) when it was fairly new. The dot-com website provided a Q&A DB. Sometimes I would give an example in a link of how I used it (usually from some of my reel material) that visitors could click on and watch.

At that time, I was on an island 45 miles long in the middle of the Pacific fighting for whatever crumbs of work the local digital production industry (long monopolized) left behind. But after the DB was set up, soon, I was getting asked to work on small projects, 2, 3, and even 5,000 miles away. My posts became like mini resumés, with clickable examples of my work. I would talk about this cool special effect, like a glow, and give an example of how I used it on some text. It was meant to help a user figure out how to use a tool. But a professional, such as one who wanted to explore using the tool on his sci-fi alien avatar would see my post and recall that another colleague in the business was looking for someone with my talents on text to do the titles for his documentary on an endangered species. I would periodically get a reply post that suggested I look into a particular job with contact information. Or sometimes an email from a complete stranger in the industry would show up in my inbox asking me if I wanted to be a part of the production team for their motion graphics portion of it.

To make the long good story short; it's hard to believe that I would even be where I am today, in online educational design, if not for ye ol' (ancient - LOL) DB. Nowadays, I don't use DBs or blogs all that much, but I rather prefer the latest - microblogging. It's much more manageable to me, with the same benefits, if not more (not as much reading). I'll talk about that in a later post.

Yikes!!!

Update: I finally was able to go back into the third post and clean up the messed-up format (all caps and large font, and broken links). It's not such a nightmare visually any more.

_______________________________________________

So, okay, I went to Pyzam.com, found what I thought might be a fun template, pasted the code in and....YIKES!!! The template changed my posts!!! The text, format and viewability went all wacky and you couldn't read them for various reasons. I fixed the first two but the 3rd one, you couldn't see most of the text except for the links. I've tried removing the code behind the post entry, trying different fonts, colors, sizes, etc. I only got it to the point where you can see the text in all caps, but it lost the links. I'm exhausted from trying right now...I'll be back later.

So all, beware, templates can change all your previous posts HTML code too. Lesson learned.

A course blog...and more

I was looking for some examples of class or course blogs that expand the use of blogs in education further than just journaling. Here is a Social Media and Open Education at Canada's University of Regina. This is an example of using a blog as a scheduled repository for students to follow each class/week. What I like about this is it's as close to a website/online course space as any LMS but...most blog tools are easy and quick to set up and use for educators and their students.

Below is an excerpt from one of their weeks about blogging.

But what really excites my educator geeky self is the link to another cool educational tool, Elluminate Live. When you watch the "Full Elluminate recording" it actually downloads the Elluminate program and session. The first part is a little bit of a yawner, especially because they are not really using the whiteboard, one of the very cool features of Elluminate. But oh wait, my technofile "ooh's" n "ahh's" sound off full blast when the presenter, Mary Waters, starts using the "Application Sharing" feature of the tool. This makes this Canadian university's course blog endlessly interactive with it's course content. Check it out...

EC&I 831 – Week #5 MP3 (Waters on Educational Blogging)

By ADMIN | Published: NOVEMBER 7, 2009


The audio-only version of our October 6/09 synchronous session is now available.


The session details are available at: http://eci831.wikispaces.com/10-06-09


Full Elluminate recording can be found here.



EC&I 831 - Sue Water on Educational Blogging: Hide Player | Play in Popup |Download
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged blogging, eci831, edublogging, personallearningnetwork,pln, suewaters | Leave a comment

CSE 694 – Blogs in (Best Practice) Education

Okay, so I’m back to try and boost my use and knowledge of blogs as an educational designer. In an effort to create blog tutorials with pedagogical strategies for faculty, I realized that I was still in inner denial of the greatest values of the time it takes to create, post, comment, and read blogs. My quick fix idea of just posting a quickstart and bunch of links to a few great educational and technology blogs will be lost on most educators if I don’t lead by example with some geeky passion oozing from a few blog posts. My goal has never been to just point colleagues to best practice teaching, but to help them understand how to show off their own great teaching through the use of new and cool educational tools that have become available and are a comfortable part of today’s millennium student’s knowledge constructionist toolbox too.

So Denvy and CSE 694 classmates; I am ready to explore and soak up everything this blog tool has to offer so I can turn around and share! My most inspirational quote has come from Will Richardson (thank you Denvy for reminding me of it)…

“There is something really powerful about easily being able to share resources and ideas with a Web audience that was willing to share back what they thought about those ideas.”

CSE 627 – Web 2.0 Tools – The Blogger

Update: As part of WOU CSE 694 class, I've created this blog and copy/pasted this post from my CSE 627 Web 2.0 tools blog (for background)

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I’ve never been a big fan of blogging. It’s not that the content of some were not periodically interesting, informative, and even on occasion, intriguing. But after too many times of being sent to, being recommended to, or following a link to someone’s blog in hopes of time well spent by the end of the (all too often long) read, I resolved that the well part was going to be missing more times than not. The lengths, and the lack of organized threads and subjects of blog narratives and comments created more and more affection in me for the forum or discussion board tool, and ingraining a shunning response to even considering the use of a blogger tool for my own higher education classrooms.

However, now fast-forward several years to 2009 — a Computer Science in Education Web 2.0 Tools graduate class at WOU has me reconsidering the continuance of turning my nose up at this tool’s time-worthiness in educational settings. After studying the latest and visiting some award-winning blogs, I’m newly impressed with how less-personal-journal-y the latest have become, and the enjoyable educational sharing that is happening within this tool. I’m especially impressed with the wider offering of newsy blogs. in the classroom, I have now witnessed some fairly fun blogs and find myself wishing my sons had such cool blogs to be a part of following and/or creating; both what it would offer them in learning from the focused news, journaling and sharing going on, as well as the fly-on-the-wall-parent I could then be.

So, in light of my newly found respect for the blogger tool, I shall venture into the blogosphere with my first blog. I still start hyperventilating at the thought of not being able to thread entries (read: organize), but I take inspiration from those that have gone before me (and a brown paper bag) and begin to breathe deep, relax and look forward to having some edufun with an edublog!