So, here’s a few points from a handout I did for a workshop a little while ago.

Given that academic life has traditionally valued, at its heart, lively discussion and debate, it is not surprising that many academics have adopted blogging, both as a part of their own academic work, and also in their teaching programs.

The following outline just some potential uses of blogs by staff and students.

Staff (individuals)

• • For teaching – eg, supplementing WebCT through general discussion of issues, references to links, modeling blogging for student assignments
  • For reflection on teaching practice, and networking with other teachers, students etc to develop teaching practice
  • For research – exploration of issues, drafts of papers for feedback, networking with other scholars internationally
  • For building professional identity within a community of practice
  • For community involvement – commentary on issues, interaction with the broader community, sharing/publication of research
  • For professional development – reflection on practice

Staff (discipline/research groups)

• • For collaborative teaching and research
  • For community engagement
  • For publication and scholarly activity

Postgraduate students

• • For research – exploration of issues, drafts of papers, networking with other scholars internationally
  • For learning – formal course work, informal exploration of issues, reflection on learning

Undergraduate students

• • For learning – formal class work, informal exploration of issues, participation in scholarly and broader community, learning about effective web interaction and responsibility.
  • For building a professional identity – presenting their professional learning and journey as part of a community of practice
  • For collaboration – encouraging conversation and embedding ongoing learning in a social, collaborative experience – part of the ‘e-commons’
  • For community building – college activities, other UNE activities, the UNE experience, the student experience whether on-campus or off-campus

Our ITD area has now set-up an installation of WordPress MU, so UNE staff or students who wish to have a blog for their teaching, research, professional work, or community involvement can go here to sign up for one.  The process is simple and only takes a minute. I’m currently talking with ITD about adapting some resources to develop a guide for using the WordPress installation – more news as it eventuates.

I love the blog, if:book from the Institute for the Future of the Book. There are always fascinating and challenging projects and ideas being posted and discussed, pushing the boundaries – or sometimes operating right outside them.

One of their recent projects is particularly interesting:

Last month we published an online edition of the Iraq Study Group Report in a new format we’re developing (in-house name is “Comment Press”) that allows readers to enter into conversation with a text and with one another. This was a first step in a creative partnership with Lewis Lapham and Lapham’s Quarterly, a new journal that will look at contemporary issues through the lens of history. Launching only a few days before Christmas, the timing was certainly against us. Only a handful of commenters showed up in those first few days, slowing down almost to a halt as the holiday hibernation period set in. Since New Year’s, however, the site has been picking up momentum and has now amassed a sizable batch of commentary on the Report from a diverse group of respondents including Howard Zinn, Frances FitzGerald and Gary Hart.

While that discussion continues to develop in the Report’s margins, we are following it up with a companion text: the transcript and video of President Bush’s address to the nation last night where he outlined his new strategy for Iraq, presented in a similarly Talmudic fashion with commentary accreting around the central text. To these two documents invited readers and other interested members of the public can continue to append their comments, criticisms and clarifications, “at liberty to find,” in Lapham’s words, “‘the way forward’ in or out of Iraq, back to the future or across the Potomac and into the trees.”

It’s worth a look at the site, not just for interesting commentary on a significant current issues, but the format may well be a useful one in an educational context. I can see a lot of applications for this sort of interactive structure in our teaching programs, particularly in terms of policy or text analysis.

I promised that I’d put a few links here for them of interesting blogs to do with teaching and learning online:

Wiki of academic blogs

bgblogging – Barbara Ganley uses blogs extensively in her teaching, and reflects in that in this blog.

2 cents Worth – David Warlick’s ‘Occasional thoughts about education teaching, learning & the 21st century’

blog of proximal development – Konrad Glogowski’s blo on ‘teaching.blogging.learning’

EdWired – a weblog devoted to the teaching nad learning of history online

Blogging Pedagogy – ‘a blog about pedagogy and English studies’ from the University of TexasETC @ BMC – Education and Technology at Bryn Mawr College

Christopher D Sessums :: Blog -Teaching, learning, and computing
While Christopher works in the schools sector, his thoughtful and reflective posts are often relevant to all levels of learning.

Tama’s eLearning Blog – ‘an eLearning blog with podcasting & blogospheric inclinations’
Tama Leavy is a lecturer in Higher Education in the Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning at the University of Western Australia.

academhack – TechTools for Academics

The Carnival has links to recent posts in the educational blogosphere on student blogging, syllabi,  student-centered learning, coping in the classroom, group work, assessment, learning, the profession, and much, much more.

There’s some great reading, and I’ve already added several new links to my del.icio.us bookmarks.

They already have quite a range of modules available across a range of discipline areas, using Moodle as their LMS.

What may also be of interest to some is the associated LabSpace site, established to share and reuse educational resources. All the content from OpenLearn can be downloaded, adapted, and used and adapted versions uploaded to the site.

Both sites are worth a look. I’ve been experimenting with Moodle a little lately, and it’s interesting to see it in action in a major site. It’s also interesting to have a look at the approach they’ve taken to the learning design in the various modules – the ones I’ve glanced at are more structured and step-by-step than we normally do here, but that’s probably appropriate for the open access nature of the project.

Developments like this and MIT’s OpenCourseWare , plus other projects such as Google Scholar and the trends to make academic journals freely accessible, do challenge us to consider what the future of higher education is – if the learning content is freely available, why should students enrol in our institutions, for an expensive three-year or more degree? What is it that we will be giving them? If we’re going to be about more than just assessment and awarding formal qualifications, how do we make the learning process more engaging and rewarding for our students?
What are the implications for our future?

As students become more comfortable thinking visually, and thinking critically about the visual, they begin to see how stepping away from language for a moment to think about their ideas in image can help the preciseness of their diction, the development of their points, and the depth of their ideas.

A particularly effective and rewarding exercise easily adaptable to any grade level is to have students post stories-without-words on their blogs. We are, after all, naturally drawn to stories from the moment we understand language. Creating compelling narratives with clear beginnings, middles and endings solely with images teaches visual literacy skills while revealing the arc of a narrative, transitions, the structure of an argument, and the importance of the carefully chosen word.

And expanding the visual to virtual worlds, Angela Thomas has reports, images and podcasts from the NMC’s 12 day symposium on the Impact of Digital Media – held in the VR environment at Second Life. (Which I’d love to explore further, but my current computer doesn’t have an adequate graphics cards apparently.)

On the authority of sources

David Warlick commenting on David Weinberger’s keynote at the SETT conference in Glasgow:

His address was pretty much the same ideas that he shared at NECC a couple of years ago, but about 2/3 into the presentation he pulled up Wikipedia. Again nothing new. He flashed through a number of the warnings that appear on many Wikipedia articles: the neutrality of this article is disputed, factual accuracy is disputed, this article contradicts another article, etc.

Then Weinberger asked…

Why is it that you will never ever see these warnings in authoritative sources. You will never see it in Britannica. You will never see it in the New York Times. And you have to wonder why. Is it because they’re never wrong? No!

He described the New York times reporting prior the the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that they were reporting information that was wrong — without warning.

Weinberger then asks,

Why can’t they acknowledge their weaknesses…the only and reluctant answer I can come to is that they are more interested in protecting their own authority than helping us to the truth.

I sat back in my chair, thunder-struck, “Wow!”

Wow, indeed. When you consider that the discussion pages behind each entry on Wikipedia usually outline many of the issues and diverse perspectives on entry topics, in addition to the clear statements when articles are in dispute, it’s really quite a good resource.

Email is for us old folk…

Is e-mail only for the old? That’s the contention of a string of articles published in the last four months, the most recent appearing today in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle says that in a study last year, “teenagers preferred new technology, like instant messaging or text messaging, for talking to friends and use e-mail to communicate with ‘old people.’” The Mercury News says, “For those of you who have just figured out how to zap spam or manage your inbox, prepare for the bad news: E-mail is, like, so yesterday.” And then there’s USA Today, which makes the claim that “E-mail is so last millennium.”

ETC@BMC commented further on this:

Our colleges have come to view email as our primary way of communicating with students but it’s not 100% effective. Another symposium attendee shared that after they released a new webmail service they discovered that within a day over 100 students had set filters to send all email from the help desk to the trash automatically. And we all struggle with getting our students to set up the forward to the email address they really check.

It seems to me the lesson in all of this is not whether or when email is going to become obsolete. The first lesson is the different attitude that young adults have to email and other communication methods. They don’t want to hear from you unless you are relevant to them. They view email as a way of receiving unwanted communications and are less patient in sorting through it than those of us who view it as a huge improvement over waiting a week for a letter or calling back endlessly because there weren’t answering machines.

(Oh, dear, I remember those days… before answering machines, before email, even before faxes…)

• developing an online survey for my PhD research project
• preparing an ethics approval application for the research project
• drafting a paper on online romance readers’ communites which I hope to submit for the 3rd International Conference on Communities and Technologies
  
• finishing a novel

All of the above need to be done by mid-November. And did I mention work is busy, as well?

I haven’t yet responded to Jim’s comments about methodology and philosophy in course structures, although I intend to, as soon as have a brain cell or three to spare
I’ve also noted a few interesting things over the past week but haven’t had the time to work them into a coherent  blog post, so in my next post I’ll just put a few snippets for consideration.

I Googled ‘academic blogs’ and came up with some useful links:

Crooked Timber’s extensive list of academic blogs, grouped under broad discipline areas.

BlogScholar.com also has a good list – you’ll find discipline links on the right-hand side, part-way down the page (it’s not especially obvious.)

Rhetorica’s Professors Who Blog link is no longer maintained as at July this year, but has a fairly long list of blogs, albeit with limited information about them.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s site also has links to academic blogs, each with a short description of the blog.

And then I found that there’s a (relatively new?) Academic Blog Portal – a wiki of academic blogs that you can add your own to. So, yes, somebody else has already done what I was thinking of

(And does anyone else think it amusing that the spell-checker in WordPress – a blogging software – does not recognise the words ‘blog’, ‘blogs’ or ‘wiki’?)

I came across the question yesterday at Jim Belshaw’s blog, and posted a spur of the moment response:

…perhaps the question isn’t so much ‘should all learning professionals be blogging’ but rather ‘should all learning professionals be actively engaging with the current developments in their discipline?’ To which, in my mind, the answer is Yes.

The ‘How?’ question then leads naturally to blogging or similar activities – because the exciting, new and innovative developments in pretty much all a university’s discipline areas are being discussed, reported, analysed and further developed on the web, through online journals, news, blogs, wikis and so on. The web is the home to the current knowledge and ideas, and is much more up-to-date than most traditional print-based academic journals, where the time-frame from research to publication can be years.

Participating in those online communities is a true scholarly activity – contributing to the ‘unending conversation’ in our discipline areas, debating ideas, furthering knowledge and understanding, and sharing that with the wider community.

Yes, it’s a time commitment, but it’s part of our pursuit of knowledge in our respective discipline areas – and it’s also a timesaver in some ways, with easy access to the leading thinkers and resources, the opportunity to share and seek feedback on ideas and drafts of papers, and so on.

On reflection, I haven’t changed my view much. I don’t necessarily think that all learning professionals/academics should be actively blogging – blogging is not for everyone, and it takes a while to develop one’s blogging ‘voice’ – but, as expressed in my previous post, I do think that we need to be very aware of, and participating in, the current developments in our respective fields. And, while I’m ready to be corrected, I can’t really think of any discipline where what is happening on the web is irrelevant.

Blogging is one way – and can be an excellent way – of actively participating in one’s discipline, and contributing to the application of ideas and knowledge in the wider community. Blogging goes further than traditional email discussion lists, conferences, academic papers, and other standard academic means of communication. So, yes, I think academics should be aware of what blogging is, reading the relevant thinkers in their fields, and at least actively considering whether blogging is an appropriate form of participation for them.

However, for those who are less confident navigating their way around the web, sometimes finding relevant blog communities can be a bit of a challenge. To assist the academic staff I work with, I’m working on putting together a wiki resource with links to blogs across a range of discipline areas. Although if anyone knows of a similar resource already existing, please let me know!

My brain is still trying to recover

The AoIR one in particular gave me vast quantities of food for thought, and I’m still processing all the various ideas, discussions, implications. With 6 sessions going at a time, each with multiple papers, for three days, there was A LOT discussed.

One thing that’s standing out for me, though, is how far behind university education is in general in grappling with the changes that the networked, information-rich world has already brought to the ways in which people interact with information and build their knowledge and learning.

I’m not just referring here to the use of web technology and social software in teaching. I’m referring to the impact of this networked world on the fundamental ways in which we practice and understand our disciplines, the ways in which we undertake, publish and disseminate our research, the ways in which we teach our students about our disciplines, and the ways in which our disciplines and foci of study are themselves changing.

Last week’s conference reinforced my long-held opinion that, rather than leave epistemology and methodology to fourth year or post-graduate levels as we have traditionally done in most discipline areas, we need now to shift that right up front, explicitly focusing our first year units around these issues. Our students have access to so much information at the click of a button that, rather than feed them more ‘content’, our prime goal should be educate them in the epistemological bases of our disciplines – how we build knowledge, how we explore theories, how evidence is sought and assessed, and so on.

These are the skills that our students need for the even-more networked future. They need to be able to work effectively and professionally in this world in which more information that you could ever have dreamed about a few years ago is available instantly. They need not just information literacy and network literacy but explicit epistemological literacy in order to find their way through and make meaning of millions of terabytes of data, to build relevant knowledge, to negotiate significant choices and actions based on that knowledge with their equally-networked colleagues, peers, clients, constituents, bosses etc.

These literacies are not simple skills. To be brutally honest, they are certainly not skills that are developed by reading a range of 10 or 20 or 30 academic journal articles and writing a 2,000 word essay that only a lecturer or tutor ever sees. Or by setting up a standard experiment and writing a report. Or by cramming for two days for a multiple-choice exam.

We can no longer get by with an approach that might have educated people for the 1980s, but certainly does not educate them for 2010 and beyond. I believe that approach is doing a massive disservice to our students.

At all levels of higher education – policy and government frameworks and funding; institutional policy, structures and cultures; and individual academic level – we need to grapple with the challenge to make our educational processes relevant, to truly educate students in how their respective disciplines and professions will be enacted and experienced in the years to come.

And yes, it’s a darn big challenge.