December 2004 Archives

This is a site I came across the other day and thought was interesting. The Detusche Welle’s 2004 International Weblog Awards honored blogs in 11 different categories and over 60,000 users voted to award in each of the categories.

First place went to someone in China only by his Internet name, "Aggressive Little Snake." His blog, the "Dog Newspaper," was described as a "good example of Weblogs bringing up an issue that is not tackled by the traditional media" by a member of the Detusche Welle's international jury. "The Weblog can be understood as a parable," Chinese jury member Mu Zimei confirmed. "The way dogs live is projected onto the lives of humans – dogs’ rights onto human rights." (I asked Ming, a student assistant in the LTC, to look at it and explain some of the content to me.

Lawrence Lessig, whose blog I've been folowing for the past year, won the jury's award for Best Journalistic Blog in English.

Mozilla's Firefox browser has the capability to recognize a webpage that is pushing out an RSS feed, such as blogs and news sources. If you go to such a page, look for the image on the bottom righthand corner of the browser window. It looks like this:   

Your first thought is probably "How is this different from any old bookmark?" The idea is that you can go to your bookmarks and see if there is a new headline from the live bookmarked blog or news feed and if you see one, and want to read it right then, you click it. I think for faculty tracking student blog posts, it's an easy way to aggregate your student blogs and keep an eye out for new entries.

Here is what it would look like. I went to the NY Times homepage and it had the RSS image in the lower righthand corner. I pointed my mouse over it to display "Add Live Bookmark for this page's feed," clicked it and selected "Subscribe to 'RSS'" which puts that page into my Live Bookmarks. As new stories are pushed out, my Live Bookmark picks them up and when up go to my bookmarks and select the NY Times bookmark. It looks like this [I made this a pop-up because of its size so you may need to allow pop-ups in your browser to see it]. Now I just click a headline and I'm displaying the story.

Get Mozilla Firefox 1.0 so you can try this feature out.

I recently read a couple articles about blogging in the professional literature. The first is Stephen Downes’, “Educational Blogging” in the September/October 2004 issue of Educause. If you are not familiar with Stephen Downes take a look at his website and check out his bio page.

The article seems geared for a someone who is generally interested in blogging for educational purposes. Downes relates, anecdotally, experiences of fifth graders at a school in Quebec City, Canada, and talks of Will Richardson’s experiences. The one solid piece of information he includes that I found useful was in citing the five majuor uses for blogs in education which he attributes to Henry Farrell whose blog is called Crooked Timber The five major uses are:

1. teachers use blogs to replace the standard class web page
2. instructors bein to link to internet items that relate to their course
3. blogs are used to organize in-class discussions
4. some instructors are using blogs to organize class seminars and to provide summaries of readings
5. students may be asked to write their own blogs as part of their course grade.

Also of value is including Will Richardson’s thoughts on why blogging is valuable in teaching writing. “Blogging, however, offers students a chance to a) reflect on what they are writing and thinking as they write and think it, b) carry on writing about a topic over a susteained period of time, maybe a lifetime, and c) engage readers and audience in a sustained conversation that then leads to further writing and thinking.” [citation: Will Richardson, “Metablognition,” Weblogg-Ed, April 27, 2004, http://www.weblogg-ed..com/2004/04/27]

The December 2004 issue of the Communications of the ACM features several articles under The Blogoshpere. The most useful to me was “Why We Blog,” (p. 41-46) by Bonnie A. Nardi, et. al. In this article, the authors report on the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of ordinary bloggers. They investigated blogging as a form of personal communication and expression, with a specific interest in uncovering the range of motivations driving individuals to create and maintain blogs. The way they did this was by conducting in-depth interviews with bloggers, who they said were located primarily in and around Stanford University between April and July 2003. All told, they said they interviewed 23 people.

They reported finding five major motivations behind blogging: documenting one’s life; providing commentary and opinions; expressing deeply felt emotions; articulating ideas through writing; and forming and maintaining community forums. ... These motivations are by no means mutually exclusive and might come into play simultaneously. In addition, they reported on the same sort of thing that I’ve discovered, that students found that blogging created a sense of community that would be less likely to emerge in a conventional classroom setting. And, that a course where students didn’t participate but only prof and TAs did not lead to much participation. As with other electronic media, they wrote, blogs in themselves are not sufficient for building a community.

"Merriam-Webster said "blog" headed the list of most looked-up terms on its site during the last twelve months." See BBC News for December 1, 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4059291.stm [thanks to Hank Pfeil for sending this]

According the article, the top ten words were:

1. blog
   
2. incumbent
   
3. electoral
   
4. insurgent
   
5. hurricane
   
6. cicada
   
7. peloton
   
8. partisan
   
9. sovereignty
   
10. defenestration

Number ten fired off a synapse from deep within my neo-cortex. I remember my old History of Germany professor at Cincy, Otis Mitchell, telling us the story of the Defenestration of Prague. I remember the story, not the details, so I went googling and went to the Wikipedia for a quick refresher. Seems that in 1618 two Imperial governors and a scribe were thrown out of a castle's window and landed in a pile of manure. They were not severely injured. However, this event is credited with starting the Thirty Years War. Students loved taking classes from Dr. Mitchell because he was quite the story teller and could have students rolling the floor at his telling of history. I suspect this was the case and why the Defenstration of Prague remained in my conscious memory all this time.

I did a little lurking this morning and there are some very impressive uses of student blogs this semester. Bill Endres freshman comp course has the students doing lengthy expository essays on their blogs. I read a few and they are very interesting. Of course, Bill is a terrific instructor knows how to draw students into dialogues, whether they are in the physical classroom or the virtual.

Leila Hudson's INDV103 class is one of those big gen ed classes. She has blogs for the certain students and the ones without blogs are posting comments. Again, lots of interesting posts. It's a good look at how some of these young people are thinking in terms of the war in Iraq.

Kurt Fenstermacher in MIS has an mix of upperlevel undergrads and grad students in MIS and computer science. Some students are posting a good bit and some aren't posting much. The ones that are posting are examples of how integrating blogs into the course can work well.

Leila Hudson, who is an assistant professor in Middle Eastern Studies, and I have a proposal in for a presentation at next summer's Syllabus2005 conference in Anaheim. The proposal centers around the LTC's roll-out of blogging to the campus this academic year, after a year of exploration. We have had a number of different and interesting (at least to me) uses of blogging in instruction. This is especially the case with Leila who is using blogs in her INDV103 class, her grad seminar and with students she is directing for research projects or a thesis.

Pithamber Polsani and I are working towards developing a questionnaire from which we will interview faculty members who have introduced blogging in their courses and from that hope to collect some interesting information to report on at a conference that Pithamber is involved in. It's called CATE2005, Computers and Advanced Technology in Education. It's great to be involved with such dynamic professors.

Met on Monday with Scott Cason, marketing director of the campus' office of enrollment management, and the office webmaster, Bonnie Gonzales. Scott had met with Jim Austin and Jim referred him to me since what he was interested in was setting up blogs for students. It sounds like Scott is interested in creating student blogs where our students can write about their college experiences and prospective students can tune in a get an appreciation of how great it is to be an undergrad at the UA. This is similar to what the folks at Eller are doing with the A Day In The Life Undergraduate Programs' blog and the individual student blogs the MBA program is using. The MBA blogs should be rolling out this week or next. I'm anxious to see how the students take to them. It seems like a great application for blogs and something I want to promote to the different colleges and admin units where similar interests are found.