By Aaron Campbell · September 21, 2006
A reader recently enquired about creating student blogs for homework puposes, wondering if we could shed some light on the issue and provide some practical tips on how to go about it.
If teachers so desired, they could allow their students to submit writing assignments via weblogs, so that they and other students could comment and discuss. Practically, they would accomplish this by having their students sign up for their own individual weblogs (at Blogger or Wordpress for example). Then, teachers would run a central class weblog that both highlights examples of excellent student work and maintains links to student blogs in the sidebar. Teachers could keep track of new student posts by subscribing to student RSS or atom feeds in an aggregator (like Bloglines), while displaying the same aggregation publicly for their students and others to read. This is how I would do it.
There is another issue teachers ought to consider, though, and that is the question: Why use weblogs for homework submission? A discussion forum or Learning Management System (LMS) would be more appropriate, for such applications maintain privacy, centralize control, and are better designed for the structured activities of a well-defined group, like a classroom of students.
Weblogs, on the other hand, are better suited toward public, dispersed conversation. They are designed with personal publication in mind. They emphasize individuals and their relation to a community, which is a unique construct for each individual. In a sense, weblogs give learners freedom to express themselves and to create their own personal communities centered around topics of their interest, what some have been calling a Personal Learning Environment (PLE). This is what makes weblogs unique from more structured forms of online communication.
In my opinion, if teachers are going to replicate the traditional classroom model of command and control online, they should do it in a private space with a discussion forum or LMS, like Moodle or Blackboard. If however, teachers want to explore a more open, constructivist approach to online communication and learning, one that encourages self direction in the learner, then weblogs are more suitable.
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Dr. Delaney J. Kirk
wrote on October 29, 2006:
What about using class blogs for teams in the class? Each team would have a blog and could communicate with each other on it—the teacher could then monitor these more easily than all those individual blogs and these learning communities could teach/learn from each other.
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Rudolf
wrote on November 01, 2006:
It’s hard to answer this question in the abstract. If discussion is the main purpose (which distributed weblogs don’t enable all that well), and if monitoring of individual discussions is high on the agenda, you might even prefer setting up a bulletin board.
Group weblogs can work quite well, though. There’s one technical glitch that will need to be avoided: don’t let students share a login to a single weblog; make sure they have their own login. Otherwise they’re reduced to signing their entries manually, which is confusing because the manual signature will contradict the entry’s automated “Posted by” line, and an omitted signature will leave you with no immediate way of knowing who wrote the piece. Both Blogger and Wordpress allow multiple user accounts to be hooked up to the same weblog; just create the weblog, then “invite” the authors you wish to accredit.
An alternative to all of the above would be Elgg or the newly opened Vox. Both of these have per-post privacy settings and let users define the groups of people who will be able to access their entries.
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Aaron Campbell
wrote on November 07, 2006:
Another issue you might want to consider is whether the use of group weblogs – in the way that you describe – will lead to the development of a Personal Learning Environment for each student; something whose existence hinges upon a particular social identity forged through Webpublishing in combination with the use of social networking features.
In my case, I prefer that my students NOT interact so much with each other on their weblogs (they have face-to-face classtime for that) but rather strive to locate communicate with people from outside the classroom on topics that are personally meaningful to each student. I suppose a small group of students running a blog could achieve the same thing if members shared common interests, but I haven’t experimented with that yet.
Thanks so much for your comments, Dr. Kirk.
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Elizabeth Hanson-Smith
wrote on November 11, 2006:
I like the main ideas of the original message, except I would recommend FeedBlitz to receive changes in students’ blogs by email, rather than having to go to an aggregator. (Student blog addresses in a sidebar in the class blog wouldn’t show recent changes, would they?)
I also use ProtoPage as my personal browser start page so that the morning’s work starts with the feeds there, plus the weather, my to-do list, and so on.
It’s all in how a teacher prefers to work, I guess. I like things sent to me, rather than having to remember to go get them.
Thanks very much for this thread.
—Elizabeth
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Aaron Campbell
wrote on November 12, 2006:
Thanks for your suggestions Elizabeth. I haven’t heard of too many people receiving their feeds via email, so I wonder what that’s like. I can’t imagine trying to manage more than 50 feeds that way, but I suppose it requires a different approach. One of the advantages of using an aggregator is that you can skim through an entire folder of feeds with one click and a scroll. But you are right: you have to go there first.
As for student links in the sidebar of a class blog showing recent changes (in the style of a feed reader), I wonder if there is a Wordpress plugin for that? You can certainly display titles, and perhaps the first sentence or two from the latest posts for your class with an RSS display plugin.
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