Moodle and Blogging for Learning

This post is being written in the hopes of inspiring some discussion around the role of blogs in education – and specifically the focal point around which they are designed.

Background

At some point in the next 6 months we will be starting to investigate ways to capitalise on Blackboard’s capacity to support 3rd party plugins.  While I certainly have my views on LMS’s – and Blackboard and WebCT in particular – this is what has been handed down to us (and me) to investigate; and investigate I shall.

Presently Moodle is being discussed as the mechanism to provide student access to blogs and wiki’s, however having looked into this a bit further this morning there are certain aspects of Moodle’s design that have me concerned – specifically with regards to blogs.

Note: This is not to say that I dislike Moodle.  All in all its extensibility looks very intriguing and I look forward to experimenting further.  My issue at this point is how it handles blogs and blog content.

Blogs as facilitators of life-long learning

As I discussed at length the other day, I have quite strong opinions on the importance of Digital Identity in learning and believe it is very important in nurturing the prospect of life-long learning.  Jim Groom suggested recently that they are toying with the idea of purchasing each student a one-year license for a personal domain.  I happen to think that’s a brilliant idea.

As I said:

“Particularly in the case of students, individual’s are at an institution for only a limited period of time, after which point they move on to new endeavours.  Use of a personal domain enables continuity of activity throughout their journey – wherever they go, their reflections, discussions, and content goes with them.  In the context of life-long learning this is particularly important, since the more seamless the continuity, the greater the opportunities for continued engagement and ongoing learning.”

Moodle Blogs

Moodle ties into this discussion in that it establishes an institution-centric view of blogging.  Yes the blogs are tied to the student, but only insomuch as they are students of the university.  Furthermore, the configuration of visibility settings – and therefore what options are available to students – lay with administrators, not bloggers.  Control of content is largely out of the hands of the blogger.

Continuing on the quote from my earlier post, in tying the blog content to the institution you are potentially creating discontinuities in the student’s life-long learning experiences; and arguably limiting the learning opportunities for them as well.

Exporting Content

I spent quite some time trying to locate a module or plugin for Moodle that would enable student blog content to be exported – ideally enabling it to be imported to another blog upon graduation – but so far I have not located any.  The significance of this is in retaining access to previous work, and therefore ensuring learners have the capacity to build on existing experiences.

One of the key benefits of blogging for me is the opportunity to witness growth and development over time.  This is only possible by maintaining continuity of work, and a sense of ongoing learning.  In the worst case if blog posts are tied to the institution, graduation from an institution could result in prevention of access to the content.

Open Education

Taking this conversation one step further, it is my view that any educational content that can be made publicly available, should be; and that collaborative relationships and opportunities for discussion on subject matter are not, and should not be, limited to students at the local institution only.

University staff – particularly academic staff – are frequently encouraged to develop working relationships across institutions, with the logic being that the knowledge-pool for a given subject is greater the wider and more extensive your network.  I see no reason why the same logic should not be extended to students as well.

Logistical Considerations

In saying all this though, from a course and institutional perspective there are questions that arise in the prospect of a distributed blogging model.  Namely, how can such a model be introduced without it resulting in administrative overload for instructors and institutions?  How would instructors keep track of all the dis-aggregated activity?

In light of the work of people like Jim Groom at UMW, and Brian Lamb at UBC, it would appear that a combination of Tagging and RSS aggregation in a CMS or LMS could be used to support a distributed blogging framework while easing administrative tasks.

Folksonomy and Course Specific Tags
One of the key values of RSS is as a method of distributing and repurposing content.  Many blog platforms now support use of tags, and frequently these tags each have their own RSS feed.

In the case of my contributions to Connectivism and Connective Knowledge for example, I tagged each post with the term CCK08.  So when the instructors requested the feeds for all student blogs, instead of sending them the generic RSS feed for my blog – which would have included a lot of unrelated content – I provided the feed for the CCK08 tag only.  Then any time I tagged an entry “CCK08″ the post would be included in the feed sent out to the central course aggregation tool along with anyone else who subscribed to the feed.

In such a model, a single blog could be used to support a student’s activities in several concurrent courses.  The key here is to establish a tagging convention, and ensure students use it.  It’s also important to ensure student blogs are configured to send the full article, rather than just a synopsis.

Aggregating the content
Once the tags were in place the next step would be to aggregate the content, ensuring it’s clear which student provided which entry.

While I’ve not seen an instance of this in the open web yet, my theory is that a combination of course-specific tagging and unique student identifiers (such as student ID) could be used to aggregate posts against student accounts in a CMS or LMS.  In order to do this though it’s likely to be necessary for students to provide the RSS feed for their course blog posts at the beginning of the session so they could be linked with the LMS/CMS gradebook.

Instructors could even create a single blog for a course (I believe Moodle lets you do this) and populate it with the aggregated posts of the entire student cohort.  This would would ease administrative workloads and provide a single starting point for students to view the work of their peers.

The significance of this approach – as opposed to using a native Moodle or Blackboard blog tool – would be that the student retains the original copy of the content in a space that would exist after their role at the institution draws to a close.