We are only 15 minutes into today’s workshop and the ideas are already flowing.
Some projects to return to…
- Mt. Holyoke Women’s study Project…
- NITLE Arab and Culture Blog…
- Coe College’s e-Portfolio
- Allegheny’s Study abroad blog http://studyabroad.allegheny.edu.
- ning and pipes – web2.0 tools to build other web2.0 applications.
- Techcrunch – http://www.techcrunch.com/
- robot text – text file that blocks search engines from crawling your site.
- Examples of Web 2.0 in use for education – http://wiki.academiccommons.org/wiki/Examples_of_Web_2_0_in_use
(http://del.icio.us/tag/BloggingAcademicExamples) - Centinary Admissions student life blog -
Covering some ground with blogs – a website that is micro content arranged in reverse chronological order. Blogs are incredibly diverse and cover a range of topics. Blogs rely on hosting but attempt to take away the other technology required to develop a web site. Google rewards multiple links so if you are searching on Google you are most likely reading blogs.
A few questions of what are the most appropriate structures of a blogging assignment and what are .
- Should posting excerises be of opinion or of process?
- What is the balance of out of class publishing and inclass discussions.
- How does one resolve Personal/Privacy issues of requiring blog postings.
- how does one rethink the way we create/evaluater writing assignments when assigned to be completed on a blog. (how to push past regurgitation to thinking about the topic in a new way and expressing one’s thoughts on a topic in a personal way.)
- how can a course blog and student blogs develop a learning community
- where/how does plagarism come into play?
Definitions -
- Blogroll – the link list that shows the social network of the blog.
- Categories – organization structure of a blog that can be thought of as folders or sections to store related posts.
- Trackback – a bad name for link generated when one comments on your blog externally on ones own blog (is that clear as mud?)
Moving on to Wikis
“wikis are no longer interesting technologically” – B.A. (This does not mean that wiki projects are not interesting.)
The social process of wikis is not generally predictable but vandalism is not normally a problem as the history/restore option easily corrects
Wikis are differentiated from blogs as wikis are about the content where as blogs tie content to the author and time of post.
Ideas for wiki use in classroom
- follow the discussion of a wikipedia entry over the course of a semester – a great exercise of social knowledge creation…
- muddiest point
- create a small encyclopedia on topic of investigation
- comparison of entries on wikipedia, citizendium, etc..
Use of social software in educaiton is a natural fit for liberal arts colleges as our ethos is one that believes undergraduates can add to the body of knowledge. -> How true is this thought?
Finding stuff
- Google blog search is good for finding bloggers.
- Technorati is for finding blog posts, blogs, and tagged content of the social web.
- Ice Rocket
