In the morning I’m making a very short presentation to some staff from another part of the university about new technologies and education. I don’t have very long, and I have a habit of giving way too much information so instead I will just use blogs and discuss how we use them in teaching and learning.
In the media program we provide a blog for every student. This is currently from semester two of first year and is maintained throughout their degree. They retain the ability to keep publishing to their blogs as graduates.
A blog is this sort of thing. It is the first native media to have evolved specifically on and for the web. It is made up of small parts (posts), that can be joined by links. They are fragmentary, use a range of writing voices, and support any sort of digital media (images, video, audio). It consists of posts (these are the minimal content units), it has a blogroll which are blogs you read, posts can be included in categories, and you usually link to things you find or read online. Trackbacks let you know if another blog post somewhere else has referred to one of your blog posts.
There are an enormous number of blog genres, we more or less expect them to be learning blogs. This means they’re about their experience as students, but since they’re blogs and they are student controlled we also hope that they contain a lot of other writing too. They usually do.
In media we use blogs specifically to:
- explore and learn reflective practice
- document and reflect on learning (theory, projects, practice)
- develop an online identity that is student controlled
- develop network literacy
- extend online skills
- opportunity to showcase work, develop a portfolio
- provide evidence of change through a subject, a semester, and over their learning careers
- models a process for life long learning and helps sustain communities of interest
- provide a space for some design skills
- provide a way for them to ‘get’ network ecologies
Introducing blogs by itself will achieve nothing. It is a practice that needs to be learnt and so needs to be taught, rewarded and modelled. In the early semesters blogs, at least in those subjects where they are particularly important, usually have an assessment weight of 30%, and in second year in some subjects it is common for this to be self assessed.
Our use of blogs is public, we don’t keep them behind a firewall. This means anyone can read them (and they do). This is done because:
- we want the students to become knowledge producers not information consumers
- if their writing is only for the class or subject then it tends to be for their teacher (and assessment), then they only write what they have to
- things happen when a student realises someone outside of RMIT has read something they wrote
- even more happens when that someone is in a different country
- when your writing is public you have to write differently than when your writing is for yourself, your class, or your teacher
- there are a range of issues that students should understand before they graduate, such as copyright, intellectual property online, the ‘nearness’ of everyone else, and that they can contribute to knowledge and practice
There are a range of technical things that students learn or that we use which are a product of using blogs. RSS, which are syndicated feeds, are a product of blogs and means you can subscribe to a blog without having to visit it all the time. This means I can aggregate all the content of all the blogs to my desktop to skim them. It also means I can maintain a ‘meta’ blog where I repost relevant student content to the one location, which means students can use this too. It is even possible to automate this, though for this to work properly you need the students to do the right thing technically, which isn’t ever going to happen.
With RSS students can then subscribe to other sources, for example professional news services (BBC, ABC and so on), research sources (eg CiteULike) and social services (facebook, flickr del.icio.us). They can subscribe to each other, to their teachers, and so on. Then it is a short step to realise that they can also use del.icio.us, citulike and so on themselves. Pretty much all of these can also be included in your blog.
Through this students learn by doing. They have to write out their ideas in a way that makes sense to others (a slow writing). They combine things across disciplines into a common location. They productively (rather than reactively) use a wide variety of resources and integrate this into their learning. They develop an understanding (which can be difficult to make explicit) of knowledge ecologies where things are no longer centralised (in a library, a book, a university, knowledge) but is distributed and the distinction between knowledge as a scarcity, and the provenance of professionals is dissolved.
(While I think the relevance of this is obvious to media undergraduates I also believe they apply to any graduate as this will be describe and be an aspect of their professional practice no matter what field they work in.)
A list of student blogs in media is maintained.
Tags:
Lifes Little Pieces,
Network Literacy,
practice,
teaching
After I smashed my laptop screen a few months ago (which was replaced) I had the odd oddness with the new one. Then this weekend (on the retreat) the lower 20% decided to retreat more thoroughly. It is sometimes black, sometimes flickers, sometimes has these cool horizontal striations. So, it needs to be fixed. All is backed up, so now I’m moving all the material to a borrowed laptop so that I can suffer minimal interruptions while it gets repaired. Except of course it is going to take most of an afternoon to move the too many big of applications, data etc off the firewire drive onto the borrowed laptop. What I am wondering is if zipping the entire account on the firewire, moving that and unzipping, would be faster than just doing a drag and copy. And I have realised that my backup software isn’t really restore software. I have an excellent copy of everything, but as far as I can tell no way to run it to restore. It could be a late day.