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The New Online Omnivores

Last weekend I attended Northern Voice, a bloggers' conference in Vancouver. The Tyee has now published my comments on the event: The New Online Omnivores.

Another try at education blogging

The English Corner is still moving along. Classes have just started in China, and I hope to see a lot of activity on the site. (I've created another blog for an English-language program in China, but it's essentially inactive.)

I've also created blogs for all my classes at Capilano College, but they've become routine. I don't expect to see the students suddenly start interacting on them.

But I'm also trying something new: Write a Novel is an experiment in open courseware, a stand-alone guide to fiction writing.

It's deliberately non-interactive: Visitors can comment if they wish, but I'm not going to provide further advice or critiques of their own writing. To get anything out of the site, the visitors will have to be self-propelled. We'll see how it goes.

In addition, I've started a blog for students and teachers of English as a foreign language. Shoptalk is a place for us to write about English usage, teaching techniques, and anything else that might increase the fun of using the language.

A Promising Start

I haven't posted here in a long time, chiefly because not much has changed: I create class blogs every semester, they're mildly convenient for the students, and they're extra work for me. But in February I started a new education blog that may actually achieve something.

It's a collaboration with Ms. Yu Shengnan, an English teacher in Jinan, China. She wanted something that would give her first-year students some additional materials to strengthen their skills in reading, writing, and listening. I put together English Corner, and both of us have been posting items.

I was glad she asked me to find listening materials; I discovered a whole world of ESL podcasts, and they've given me ideas for creating similar audio materials. I'm also going to experiment with short video clips.

The students don't visit as often as we'd like, for a simple reason: They don't have their own computers. So they can log on only when they can get access to one of the computers in their library, or in an Internet cafe. Just a few of them have posted comments, but they're a livelier crowd than my own students.

If you click on the Site Meter icon, you can follow the traffic—almost all the visits are from Jinan, but a few are from farther away (including a former Jinan student now doing graduate work in Sweden). You'll also see that the site is "sticky"—visitors tend to hang around for close to 20 minutes a visit.

The site is far from perfect, but it's an encouraging start in a new direction.

Typepad instead of PowerPoint

Melanie McBride, a webwriter and teacher, has decided that she prefers Typepad instead of PowerPoint as a presentation tool in classroom lectures. Well, who wouldn't?

Meanwhile, I'm setting up new course blogs for the semester that starts next week. While they are more of a service to the student than a benefit to the teacher, and they don't generate much online discussion, my students tell me they like them.

Teaching and Learning Online

I've just stumbled across Teaching and Learning Online, a course blog run by Tom Layton at the University of Oregon. I ilke the simplicity and imagination of the layout.

Another Year of Education Blogging

With the 2004-05 school year over, I should comment on how course blogging has gone. Not much has changed: The students seem to appreciate their blogs as useful additions to their courses, but they take very little active part in them. The blogs are a convenient source of handouts, and maybe they're using some of the links, but that's about it.

Nor have I been able to interest my colleagues in using blogs, whether in their own courses or for administrative purposes. This is true also of a non-college teaching project I'm involved in, teaching creative writing to teenagers. I've created a "Zine" for the kids to publish their work, a "Workshop" for them to post drafts, and a "Teachers" blog for the other instructors to share ideas in. The kids have been offered author status in "Workshop," but only one has taken it up—and he hasn't actually posted anything. One of the two other instructors has posted to the "Teachers" blog, but only once.

So the vast majority of my students and colleagues are still unpersuaded by the attractions of blogging. Still, I plan to create new blogs for my courses in September, and when the creative-writing workshops resume then, I'll try to get the new crop of kids to get involved.

What I will not do is to try to coerce students or colleagues into blogging. That seems to me a failure to understand what this medium is all about: a chance to express oneself freely and to seek free expressions from others.

Still Tinkering

Once again I've been using blogs for administrative purposes in my classes, and once again the students are saying little or nothing. They do seem to find it convenient to have handouts and supplemental materials posted to the site, but then I have to remember to upload those materials.

I've been trying out a blog in a slightly different context: Since late last year, I've been teaching creative writing to teenagers once a month. It's a remarkable program, created last fall by a Korean writer, and I'm having fun with it. All the kids are Korean, and many have been in Canada for just a few years. Their English is remarkably good, and they're excellent storytellers.

When the program's website went down, I created a little blog for my students; when the site came up again, I turned the blog into The Zine, a place where students can publish their work.

By June they'll each have a mini-book of their own writing, but this is another way to help them reach an audience and to see what their work looks like in this medium. I've been encouraging the kids to submit stuff, but most seem too shy. Well, I'll see them again on Saturday and try to persuade them to send me more of their writing.

Another End-of-Semester Report

I've used blogs again for my three classes—one for a basic composition course, one for my Outdoor Recreation students, and one for my course in freelance article writing. They've been useful administratively: I can post handouts and announcements.

But this amounts to giving myself more work for the convenience of students who didn't manage or bother to show up for class. In the last few weeks I've voted with my fingertips by just not bothering to upload the handouts.

Nevertheless, I've created a new blog for a new course I'll teach next semester, and I plan to clean up and revive the blog I used for my Tourism Degree students last year. One group of Tourism students actually created a good blog as part of their project, and it might happen again.

Meanwhile one of my colleagues got her students to create blogs as part of their coursework. It was an interesting experiment, though the blogs themselves were atrociously written and designed.

I suppose that my course blogs might do better if students were required to post to them, to serve as co-authors, etc. But I'm not interested in yet another medium in which to coerce people. If students don't want to communicate via blogs, that reflects on the blogs—not on them.

Good Article on Education Blogging

The September-October issue of Educause Review has a long and thoughtful article on using blogs in education. You can read "Educational Blogging," by Stephen Downes in HTML format, or click to the table of contents and see it in PDF. Other articles look interesting as well.

Critical Thinking and Composition

I've just run across another course blog, Critical Thinking and Composition, which includes both the instructor's posts and those that student bloggers consider their best. I'll follow it with interest; my own course blogs aren't stirring much student activity at all.

A Lively Class Blog

It's a long title, but the blog itself is getting some lively and thoughtful posts from students: AP College English - Period 10 - Oak Park River Forest High School - 2004-2005 - Weblog - Blogging the Literary Life.

Library At Sea

Here's an education blog with a difference: Library At Sea is on board a ship cruising from Vancouver to Kobe. I'll be interested to see what it reports.

NYT on Education Weblogs

The New York Times tells us that In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards. Worth reading.

Educational Weblogs

Educational Weblogs is always a useful resource, and certainly worth visiting as the summer winds down and teachers start thinking about using blogs in their courses.

I do have one wish. The site assumes that its visitors are conversant with blog terms and technology, so it doesn't explain those terms as clearly as it could. After all, a basic premise of education is that your students don't know as much as you do, so you need to explain what may seem self-evident...because to many of your readers, it's not self-evident at all.

Edweblogs.org: NECC 2004

Here's the blog of an impending conference on education technology in general and education blogging in particular: Edweblogs.org: NECC 2004.

Teaching and Developing Online

Teaching and Developing Online is an education blog out of Saskatoon. It's gracefully designed and offers a lot of resources. Worth a visit!

Early Adopters

In their comments on my last post, Toby and Elizabeth reflect the mixed feelings I've had about education blogs. Much of the enthusiasm--and much of the frustration--stem from the fact that we're all early adopters. We get a kick out of this stuff, and we want to evangelize about it.

Others, however, don't see the use of it. While most of my students this past year visited their class blog, almost none of them contributed anything of their own even when I made them co-authors. They just didn't see the point of doing so. If not for that one group of tourism students who created a blog for their major project, I would have ended the year feeling pretty disappointed.

I also see the same reluctance among my colleagues. A few weeks ago I created a departmental blog where we could post course outlines, talk about promoting our new certificate program, etc. It died at birth. When I get around to it, I'll erase the poor thing.

A case like that reminds me of the general reluctance of teachers in the late 80s and 90s to have much to do with computers at all. They accurately foresaw that these stupid machines would increase their workloards, not reduce them. Unless you were an early-adopting geek, computers were not fun and not progress.

So while it's disappointing that colleagues and students aren't as interested in blogging as we are, that's their choice. The onus is on the early adopters to show that blogging can be a means to a non-geek end: a way to teach and learn that enhances the ordinary classroom experience.

My next experiment in education blogging will be "Ask the English Teacher," intended mostly for teachers and students of English as a foreign language. Apart from an occasional rant, I'll let others determine the content by the questions and comments they send.

And of course I'll put together blogs in time for next September's classes...but I won't expect a lot from them.

End of Term Report

If not for the student blog mentioned in my previous post, this report would be a largely negative one. Having experimented with blogs all year, I got decidedly mixed results:

•My colleagues were not eager to get involved; only one or two took advantage of their co-author status, and did little.

•Students were mildly interested in co-authoring, but again did little. They did enjoy the convenience of having handouts and class news posted to the blog. A cynic might say their class blogs made absenteeism easier to justify. They don't appear to have used the lists of general and specific resources I created for their blogs.

•While I too found it convenient to have items up on one blog or another, it did become just another chore—and sometimes a chore I forgot or didn't have time for. Once again, these labour-saving machines tend to create still more work.

•Probably the most convenient use of blogs was in my Web Content Development course, which met in a computer lab. On the class blog I created links to sites I wanted us to visit. Then, when I met the class, I could direct them to the blog and we'd go through the links to study and analyze the text of those sites. (On the other hand, I will never teach such a course in a computer lab again, so help me Tim Berners-Lee! It was a deadly place to try to conduct a discussion.)

A Pleasant Surprise

I'm teaching a course in communications for my college's tourism degree students, and they've worked in groups all semester to create media kits promoting an event or region. One group has been working on a ficititious mountain-bike festival here in North Vancouver (our trails are, I'm told, the envy of the world). Like the other groups, their kit consisted of items like a brochure, a media release, an article, and a Website about the event.

Unlike the other groups, who mostly stuck to PowerPoint presentations, they put all their documents into a blog about the event. The result was remarkably good. I told them it was the first really imaginative use of blogging for education that I'd seen (including my own blogs), and I've sent the URL around to all the other faculty in Tourism and Communications. If you'd like to see it, you're welcome to visit The Shore Mountain Bike Festival 2005.

Yet Another Midterm Report

My students, with a few exceptions, continue to avoid posting in their course blogs. My faculty colleagues are even more reticent. The blogs I left up last semester have been deserted by the students they were created for. So as a means of voluntary interaction, they leave a lot to be desired.

As an administrative convenience, however, blogs have their uses. My Web Content course meets tonight in a computer lab. Rather than have them chasing all over the Web while I scribble URLs on the whiteboard, I've uploaded links to their blog, offering a number of sites dealing with intellectual property. The links include a slide-show tutorial on US copyright law and a concise summary (with links) of Canadian copyright law.

I've also posted a handout I'll use in tomorrow morning's first-year tourism class. This is mostly for the convenience of anyone who misses class, or who loses the handout. At least I won't have to dig the item out of my files when people come looking for it.