Blog Week Post

Last week I had two conferences and a major assignment…. apologies for the late post.

DAY 1: COMPUTERS CAN SCAFFOLD STUDENTS TO IMPROVE BLOG VALUE

I’m not a teacher so I don’t have a classroom. I am a teaching assistant for an online second-year university course. One article I read found that students tend to post monologues online and their comments tend to be “social presence” or comments like “nice work” rather than anything critical or collaborative (Kim, H., Bateman, B. (2010). Student participation patterns in online discussion: incorporating constructivist discussion into online courses. International Journal on E-learning. 9(1) 79-98.)

A system that scaffolds students in blogs and comments might be helpful: the system would prompt students to apply a “critical-thinking” heuristic to consider multiple viewpoints, pro’s and cons, and provide evidence for points of view. A program called WRAP does this with nurses learning how to write literature reviews: http://www.aacts.ac.uk/AboutAACTS/AboutAACTS.html

DAY 2: VANITY PUBLISHING… NEEDING AN AUDIENCE AND PURPOSE

I avoid blogs and blogging because they tend to lack curation, focus, depth, and quality control. Some people believe opinions cannot be “wrong”. What about a medical opinion? Or a legal opinion? Or an engineering opinion? They can be wrong and they can be negligent. How valuable is an opinion without observing rhetoric, without demonstrating critical thinking and offering evidence?

Any writing not meant to be used by an audience for a purpose is likely to be lazy writing. At a convention I attended last week on teaching business communication, instructors found a big difference in student motivation and writing quality when their classes “worked” for real world clients instead of artificial assignments that would never be read by anyone but the prof.

DAY 3 BLOG EVAL: WILL RICHARDSON HAS LOTS OF OPINIONS AND RHETORICAL QUESTIONS

Content & Ideas (3/4) Seems to have a clear purpose (complaining about education issues)

Design (2/4) Huge banner picture that doesn’t communicate a lot; menu items helpful; a lot of clutter along the right side with little to help orient us – few headings or groupings; headlines for posts communicate little and seem strident or glib

Interest (2/4) Many opinions and links without synthesis of different points of view or suggestions for what to do about issues; feels political and soundbite-ish

Writing quality (2/4) Seems focused on personal views without synthesis or reasoned evaluation or design of new concepts

DAY 4 CONCERNS WITH BLOGS: A BILLION MONOLOGUES

As previously mentioned, my concerns with blogs is they are monologues that lack critical thinking or collaboration. They often express personal opinions, sometimes in forms as simplistic as sneers, without much value. A scaffolded question and answer approach to drafting blogs and comments could help. The thing about a blog is you can say all sorts of dumb things. If you’re in a true conversation, someone is more likely to say, “Why do you say that? But that doesn’t fit with this. Boy, you complain a lot… how about saying something constructive?”

DAY 5 BLOG LINKS

I don’t use blogs so I don’t have anything to share. I did create a process portfolio for my advanced HPT class in the form of a blog but it’s not publicly available. The portfolio included a series of reflections on each assignment and a link to download the assignment for review. To try to make the blog interesting for the poor prof who had to read it, I attempted to find some insight to share for each entry.

FINAL DISCUSSION: ETEC 522 BLOG – MORE MODULARITY

I like the ETEC522 blog concept because it is simple to use and a free alternative to an expensive LMS. On the other hand, I find the reverse-chronological nature of posts makes it time consuming to use the resource if I am not watching it every day. I shared links to the blog to friends but I realize it would be nearly impossible for them to process the content in any meaningful way. Where would they start? How would they navigate the posts?

I’d suggest breaking the posts down into more easily navigable modules: different pages for different types of information. At the very least, each “week” would have its own page or at least some way to jump to that week. Posts would be collapsible (similar to the way comments can show up or be hidden) to make things more manageable as modules.

Posted in: Week 07: Blogs