blogs – Diana Bang's ETEC 565A e-portfolio

(Image mashup: Exploring the world of blogs and wikis)

My musings on blogging:
Upon reflection of setting up my UBC WordPress blog, I can definitely say that I’m beginning to master the brief learning curve and getting accustomed to the features that WordPress blogs has to offer. I think it also helped that I’ve used Google’s Blogger before and I definitely appreciate the use of this platform for my ongoing reflections on my learning journey throughout this course. One of the aspects I am still working on is sprucing up my html skills as at times I’ve had to revise and re-edit my posts as the html code hasn’t been visually perfect. In any case, I do find it useful to switch easily from html to visual views so that I can gauge how the html will affect the appearance of my post.

With the proliferation of blogs ranging from personal to professional in nature, it’s clear how functional and useful these can be as it can inform one’s learning and also obtain different opinions on a variety of topics. As the e-learning toolkit cited blogging, particularly educational blogging is indeed becoming increasingly popular. To keep up with them it does help to have them all on RSS feeds using products like Google Reader to organize and track all the information available. There are several professional blogs that I follow including David Rothman, Krafty Librarian, Jessamyn West’s librarian.net, Dean Giustini’s The Search Principle- among others as I find them particularly informative to help me stay current with the latest trends occurring in the field of librarianship.

As a notable mention, I recently stumbled upon a paper by my previous course instructor Dr. Diane Janes on blogging. It offered practical insight into how blogs can be incorporated in a constructivist classroom. Here’s a link to the paper for further reading: http://www.jdwwebdesign.com/edutech/pdfs/Blogs-Constructivist.pdf

Wikis:
Exploring the world of wikis was first examined in my LIS 766 Intro to Health Sciences Librarianship course at the University of Western Ontario. Out of curiosity, I re-visited my course wiki site at: http://healthresearchguides.wikispaces.com/ and surprisingly the Dentistry subject page I created was revised by a former classmate back in ’07. Further to this experience working on a wiki page, I recall that last term in ETEC 510 Design of Technology-Supported Learning Environments one of the pages I created was on Motivational Theories and Design at: http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/etec510/Motivational_Theories_and_Design. As there was a bit of a hiatus since ’07 to ’11 that I had experienced working on wikis I remember consulting the various help pages from Wikipedia and gathering resources to create my wiki entry as citing verifiable sources was imperative to ensure its accuracy. It was quite an intensive research process and a definitely worthwhile experience to learn to use the “wiki language.” In the end, I don’t think I realized the full potential of working on a wiki as I didn’t chose to edit another person’s existing entry and instead I created my own. I recall that other students in the class also expressed the fact that perhaps MET students may be “too polite” to edit another students’ work. Unlike Wikipedia’s infamous edit wars, I felt that the process of working on a wiki entry using MediaWiki was pretty diplomatic and straightforward.

Looking now to my most recent experience with actually editing pages and engaging in the discussion “talk” portion of this week’s wiki activity I have to say it was a bit challenging to keep up-to-date with all the conversation that was occurring. I imagine that with more than 20+ students working on a wiki entry (say for example Wikipedia which is publicly accessible and can be edited by anyone) it can probably become even more challenging to keep content organized and maintain its accuracy. Yet, there are definitely benefits to using wikis as information is forever changing and certainly the features of a wiki enables this dynamic content to be created, edited and continually discussed. At the same time, it is dependent on its active contribution (to maintain its currency). Thus, some of the content from my health sciences course wiki may be outdated as I noticed from the history tab that it was last revised in ’07. Since that time, links may have changed, and more recent information about topics are probably available. In contrast, I imagine that the ETEC 510 Design Wiki will continue to be active as new rounds of MET students create new entries and revisions causing iterations of the course wiki to unfold.

Also, another notable mention related to the world of wikis is the HLWIKI- which is chock-full of information on the health sciences library field (geared for health librarians but accessible to anyone) available at: http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/UBC_HealthLib-Wiki_-_A_Knowledge-Base_for_Health_Librarians.

References
Beasley-Murray, J. (2009). User:Jbmurray/madness. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray/Madness

Guistini, D. (2011). HLWIKI. Retrieved from http://hlwiki.slais.ubc.ca/index.php/UBC_HealthLib-Wiki_-_A_Knowledge-Base_for_Health_Librarians

Janes, D. (n.d.). Weaving blogs into a constructivist classroom. Retrieved from http://www.jdwwebdesign.com/edutech/pdfs/Blogs-Constructivist.pdf

MediaWiki. (2011). ETEC 510: Design wiki. Retrieved from http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/etec510/Main_Page

Wikipedia (2011). WikiProject murder, madness and mayhem. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Murder_Madness_and_Mayhem

Wikispaces. (2007). Health research guides. Retrieved from ttp://healthresearchguides.wikispaces.com/

Were this a F2F course, she would set up office hours – but that’s not an option in an online course, is it? Post your ideas in the what could Trinh do discussion forum.

After much consideration, I think some of the options available for Trinh includes the following:

– Make the case for getting a teaching assistant (or more for each course section) to help her out with managing 150+ students (addressing their course inquiries, providing formative and summative assessments, etc).
– Distinguish what questions can be addressed to the TA and/or instructor to students enrolled in her course.
– Use one designated email for all course communications and let students know to send course-related messages just to this email address (rather than multiple email addresses).
– Clearly let students know when you’re available/not available (for example let students know when she’ll be away for a period of time via announcements, emails, and/or discussion postings so they understand why you may not be able to reply back to them right away).
– Create different types of help sections in the discussion forums so that students can obtain assistance and support from their peers to address their inquiries.
– Use filter/labelling email management strategies to help organize the content of her emails (i.e. if she’s using Gmail’s mail forwarding service then she can also filter out the messages being sent to her designated course email address and put it into a labelled folder to address all course-related inquiries).
– Offer scheduled online chats and/or videoconferencing sessions essentially setting up “virtual” office hours to address students’ questions.
– Build presence by offering YouTube video presentations (that may also address students’ questions and clearly communicate your expectations of them).
– As Anderson (2008) suggests on p.356, the virtual teacher has to set and adhere to appropriate timelines to help student have realistic expectations and relieves the teachers of the unrealistic expectation of providing instantaneous 24/7 feedback.
– Time management is key for Trinh- rather than checking online activities or email constantly.
– Develop and implement an explicit assessment framework for students so they understand what is expected of them throughout the course (i.e. assignments, participation, etc).
– Make assessments a reflective exercise by assigning students the task of using their discussion postings in their blogs to show evidence of their understanding. As Anderson (2008) states, this moves the responsibility from the teacher to the student and can save the teacher time.
– Use student moderators to help lead class discussions and act as peer support (leading to less emails from students for Trinh to manage).
– Provide an archive of the live streaming presentations so students in different time zones that may have missed these sessions can catch up.
– Clearly communicate course expectations, assignment deadlines, weekly readings, etc. from the onset via the course syllabus. Perhaps this information is not clear for students or it’s located in several different sections so she may want to consider amalgamating into one area and letting students know that it’s their responsibility to diarize this information (i.e. assignment deadlines, live presentations, etc).

Reference
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an online learning context. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi (Eds.), Theory and practice of online learning, (pp. 343-365). Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University. Retrieved from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008_Anderson-DeliveryQualitySupport.pdf

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