Comments on: The street finds its own use for things

By: mactually » Blog Archive » Blogs in education - linkdump

mactually » Blog Archive » Blogs in education - linkdump — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:14:52 +0000

[...] Five levels of using blogs in education Blogs in Education – huge link-list How you SHOULD use blogs in education How NOT to use blogs in education [...]

By: midsolutions.org - ID weblog : Out of the Crooked Timber

midsolutions.org - ID weblog : Out of the Crooked Timber — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 23:49:55 +0000

[...] While doing some research for a presentation at my institution I happened across a very interesting blog titled “Out of the Crooked Timber”. The site is maintained by a number of educators and guest bloggers, and contains links to equality valuable blogs. If you are looking for a series of engaging articles that provide practical advice on classroom practice spend a little time on this site. Comments (0) [...]

By: Alex Halavais

Alex Halavais — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 20:37:21 +0000

For #3, above, you might be interested in taking a look at my MT course blog for last spring's Media law class, though it had about 180 students: http://alex.halavais.net/courses/law For #4 and up, you might also be interested in a school-wide introduction of blogs for one of our grad programs: http://blogs.informatics.buffalo.edu/ Neither are exemplars, by any means, but they are fun experiments.

By: Ray

Ray — Sat, 20 Sep 2003 21:41:34 +0000

An unusual intersection of my real life interests with my day job. The way I’m trying to play (legitimate) concerns about privacy and identity at UC Berkeley is to wrap web applications in our campuswide authentication system: poor man’s (i.e., open source) single-sign-on. That way you can restrict your collaborative blogs to your instructors and students, or protect your collaborative blogs against frauds and trolls. As the first step, I integrated campuswide authentication with the Apache webserver that most free web apps run under. The second step (staircase, rather) is to adapt those web applications to automatically log in (or refuse admission to) users based on the resulting Apache-compatible ID. This turns out not to be a tough job. A tough job has been finding good weblog software to adapt. The open source leaders for collaborative blogs (Drupal and Nucleus, to my mind) are lacking in ways that require more serious attention than my group can devote to them right now. Movable Type has just recently disambiguated their license, but I’m still reluctant to sink much publicly-funded labor into a privately-yankable enterprise. But the technical problems are easily manageable. The unmanageable problem is finding developers.

By: Lane Dunlop

Lane Dunlop — Thu, 18 Sep 2003 17:37:52 +0000

i have two faculty using blogs this block at Cornell College. I'm the educational technologist at the school. One professor had no experience with blogs and very little with the web. But he has jumped right into it. It's a reading/writing intensive class. Each day the students read a chunk of a book and post two paragraphs of their thoughts on the reading. All 10 students have posting access for the site. So far it has been great, with the professor saying that this is the best way he has ever done this class. i'd give you the URL, but he went private blog model. We are using TypePad. I set up the class blog and in about 25 minutes had them all registered and posting to their little heart's content. The second class at Cornell College using blogs is French 304. They are using a french language blogging service called monblogue. The faculty member was already into blogging, so she set it all up herself and has had great success. Here's an example of one of her student's blogs. Don't let the french throw you. You'll get the general idea. I'm planning on doing a lot more with blogs and our faculty and students in the near future. We just set up our Writing Studio with a TypePad blog yesterday. I'm holding blog workshops every month for faculty and students. I'm going to be keeping track of everything on the instructional technology blog i recently set up. i appreciate henry's ideas and will show his post to some of the faculty who keep asking me how they would use a blog in a classroom setting.

By: jholbo

jholbo — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 10:23:51 +0000

Hi, Henry, since you were so kind as to link to my little academic corner, I’ll just add my two cents. When TypePad got started I knew I wanted to use it for module blogs and it really is working out very well. I don’t have to worry about all the campus sysadmin issues because I’m just doing it on my own nickel. (It doesn’t really cost me, however, because I’m content to pay for TypePad just for my own use. Using it for my modules does not cost anything above and beyond.) My Nietzsche module is small: 14 honours students. Each of them has to have his/her own blog, and only one or two had any idea what a blog was on day one. Now it is working out fine. They took to it quickly enough, and it has noticeably improved our 3-hour seminar meetings. They visit each other and comment and so forth. My intro module is huge: 525 students. I have nine tutors. I’ve got a main blog and three subsiduary tutor group blogs (three tutors each) so it’s really a four-ring circus. So far so good. Each student is required to post three comments to specified assignment postings by individual tutors in the course of the semester. Overall, it improves coordination and allows interaction to a far greater extent than I’ve ever managed before. So blogging works, for big and small classes. (But we knew it would.) I have a minor problem, which is that students comment with silly fake names, which makes it hard for tutors to connect faces and names with online aliases. I have no easy, TypePad enabled way to insist that students use, say, only university email addresses. But I could easily just order them to use their real names and school addresses. I think a bit of anonymity makes them more lively, however, so I haven’t bothered, because I haven’t suffered any troll infestations or toxic flames or anything of the sort. TypePad allows me to password protect the whole thing, and I’m prepared to do so if being open to the public becomes a problem. Which it hasn’t. Really the whole process of building and maintaining five blogs for two modules, over 500 students and nine tutors has been remarkably smooth and uneventful.

By: Henry

Henry — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 16:30:12 +0000

The paranoia about cgi scripts is a real problem. I’m lucky – one of my former colleagues at the suburban campus where I teach has been cooking up his own cgi scripts for years, and managed to secure the approval of the system administrators. The guys on the main campus are a lot more chary of letting mere professors in at the system. Obviously, MT is remarkably well behaved as cgi based setups go. I’ll be trying to do some talks on weblogs as a classroom tool after I’ve gathered experience about what works, and what doesn’t/

By: chuck

chuck — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 14:45:05 +0000

I’ve been using a course blog (linked above) in my freshman composition courses where I will post links and comment on class discussion. Each student is also required to keep a blog as part of his or her grade (in the course blogroll). Eventually, the hope is that students will at least gain some experience with HTML for their web projects at the end of the semester. I’ve been doing this on Blogger and so far have had few problems. Permalinks, for example, now seem to work nicely, but some students are struggling to add comments. I’ll likely try to move things over to MT (Typepad perhaps) in future courses. Overall, I’ve had a positive experience with it, even after my course garnered some unexpected publicity when a couple of prominent bloggers (Rachel Lucas, Oliver Willis, Joanne Jacobs) called attention to my blog. In fact, my students actually enjoyed the brief attention. In fact, the attention has, I think, made my students more aware of writing for an audience, and we had a chance to discuss how blogs could be used to engage with important political issues.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 09:43:11 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this a bit too. The trouble is that university sysadmins tend to be quite paranoid/conservative when it comes to letting you do things like execute custom cgi-scripts on their servers. At least, they do here, this observation may not generalize. I’d love to have an MT-based blog for each of my courses, with each of the instructors having posting rights, the students commenting etc. But I’m not going to try to do this using blogger!

By: eszter

eszter — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 04:40:33 +0000

I’ve posted a Follow-up: http://www.esztersblog.com/archives/00000410.html