Managing Blogs in the Classroom

One of the issues with use of blogs in the classroom, which I’m still trying to resolve, is how best to orientate the course structure, organise the resulting student blog feeds, develop a portal to all the distributed discussions that are taking place, and establish a sense of cohort cohesion while affording individuals as much freedom as possible. Because, for all of their inherent value to the individual, blogs are a tricky medium to implement in a large group or cohort of students.

Existing Models

Having said this, there are many different existing models to look to for inspiration.

For instance there is the self-organising network model, as seen in Connectivism and Connective Knowledge ’08 and ’09, in which individuals developed their own loosely joined networks based on criteria that they identified (either consciously or sub-consciously). Thus you ended up with a distributed collection of self-directing, self-governing mini-networks or hubs, each with their own characteristics and means of organising themselves and their activities.

In this case the strength and emphasis lay in the hubs and less at the course centre (if it can so be called), where the instructors and course topics sit.

In the case of CCK08 there were central structures in place to provide a means of interacting as a single cohort – most notably a Moodle instance – however due to the strength, size and autonomy of the smaller networks, the central space played a relatively smaller role, at least for me.

The advantage of this model from my perspective as a student of the course, was that the smaller networks remained intact after the course drew to a close, and students maintained ties with one another. This was not universally the case for everyone I’m sure, but it certainly was for me.

The disadvantages though, were that it was virtually impossible to gain a holistic sense of where the class was at as a cohesive entity, since student networks were anywhere and everywhere and there was no clear indication of who was who and what they were up to. Much like an iceberg, we knew there was a whole lot of activity going on, but only managed to see and engage in a very small portion of it.

It should be emphasised here though, that the structure and distibuted nature of the course was by design and not simply a result of the use of blogs. Certainly too, this was exacerbated by the sheer size of the cohort (2,200 students at the beginning), their distribution across the planet, and the presence of many different languages.

Then there are more traditional examples, such as Facilitating Online Communities in which blogs are used as an important space for reflection and discussion on specific topics as posed by students in their blog posts, but there is a far stronger emphasis on a central space (in this case the course wiki and use of Google Groups for discussion).

In this example, an important distinction to make from CCK08 was the dramatic difference in cohort size in FOC08, which I recall was less than 50 people at the start of the course. This smaller size meant it was far easier to track the trends and overall progress of the course, which ultimately felt far less overwhelming.

Impressions

My feeling at the moment is that the model used in CCK08 is perhaps too loosely joined for most people – with the exception of those extremely familiar with social media and content aggregation, and equally importantly those who are comfortable and experienced with self-directed learning, which not everyone is.

This might be seen reflected in the dramatic drop in participation in the latter half of CCK08, where there were perhaps only a hundred or so active contributors in the course.

Proposal

I think the ideal solution is to leverage the aggregating opportunities inherent in RSS in conjunction with a fairly strong central presence – such as a wiki, Google Group, or Moodle course – designed to maintain group cohesion and provide a basic framework upon which learners can build or diverge. Here you would include the traditional elements of course outline and recommended readings, and group discussion but also pull in and highlight the activities going on in distributed spaces.

That way, students who prefer central spaces and clear direction would have these opportunities, while those who prefered to maintain and interact in distributed ones could do so as well, while not being cut out or isolated.

How to Aggregate?

The main question in my mind here though is how best to aggregate the student content. Having seen plugins like FeedWordPress used in conjunction with a “course blog” with a traditional theme I’m not so sure I think that’s the best way to go. After all, when you get beyond a few dozen students it becomes really hard to track new posts. Certainly you could assign each feed a unique tag or category, thus establishing some structure to the data, but in the end the work of each individual student is far less emphasised, and instead lost within a deluge of aggregated content.

I’m inclined to think that the Netvibes model is more ideal here, in which each blog is allocated its own dedicated area on screen (in a widget in the case of Netvibes), depicting a brief synopsis of the post and the option to click through to read and discuss the article on the author’s blog. This maintains the focus on the distributed spaces while creating an initial portal to feature all student blogs.

That said though, aggregators like Netvibes can be pretty data intensive, so it would be nice to use WordPress for this if there were perhaps a magazine style theme that would let you devote specific spaces in the blog to different aggregated feeds.

Thisis something for me to look into I guess…

Posted via email from Mike Bogle