Welcome back to my educational technology blog! I’m currently taking courses in research methods and business ventures. It’s week four and I’m finally starting to grasp the new concepts and course design. We’re using the learning management system (LMS), Blackboard Vista, for the research course which I’ve become quite familiar with since these are my 7th and 8th courses. However, our ventures course takes place in a blog which is a new experience.
Although I’m familiar with the layout and design of blogs because of my time here, it’s a different experience taking a course through a blog. My first challenge was following the course chats. In our LMS, we could follow various discussions and threads with ease. In the blog, posts are organized by tags and categories. Each new post is added by date. I found it confusing until our instructor suggested we use an RRS reader to help us figure out which posts we had read. I’m now using Google Reader which does help you differentiate between the old and new but it doesn’t sort posts by subject so I’m back to trying to read via the blog itself. I’m 400 posts behind but I’m hopeful that I will catch up! I will keep you posted.