One of the advantages of blogs is the ease with which one can deep link to other individual entries (the techie term seems to be the `discreet addressability of information objects').

Here's an entry on Future learning environments (the talk I never gave) from Martin Weller's blog that chimes with discussions I've been having with colleagues.

Feeds

Found this on the web and it struck a cord. Not entirely convinced that subscription is really making life easier ...

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Cult of the amateur -v- the tyranny of the guilds

There was a provocative article in last week's Observer on Web 2.0 and blogs (Enough! The Briton who is challenging the web's endless cacophony, David Smith, technology correspondent
Sunday April 29, 2007 The Observer).

It gave (unnecessary) publicity to Andrew Keen's forthcoming book on "digital narcissism" (laughably entitled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy).

However, it did provoke an interesting response the following week from an academic who sees blogging, social networking etc. as continuations of an earlier radical tradition of published dissent from formerly marginalised voices (e.g. The Black Dwarf). Here's the response in full:

Don't bash bloggers

In his rush to dismiss bloggers, Andrew Keen ('Enough!', News, last week) seems to be unaware of the very history of journalism. We need only to consider the English radical press of the 19th century to find powerful examples of writing that can be thought of as the precursor to social networking on the web. The 'pauper correspondents' of political newspapers such as Black Dwarf were not professional journalists, but members of communities who found their rights threatened. In similar fashion, the citizen journalism of the present day offers those who find their voices marginalised or misrepresented by the mass media the opportunity to speak in their own voices from within their communities (think of South Korea's successful OhmyNEWS).

Keen's desire to separate the author from the audience also flies in the face of the practice of journalism. I first read the work of music journalist Paul Morley in his self-published fanzine, Out There. It is as a fan that Morley, like so many amateur and professional journalists, remains a member of an audience, of a community. It is when we lose touch with our communities that we begin to lose our humanity, and our writing loses its relevance.
Dr Chris Atton
reader in journalism
Napier University, Edinburgh

I've just created a Slide Show!

I've just created this slide show using Slide.com.

It was easy and instant.

Pedagogic PowerPoint 1

I've been doing some work recently on using PowerPoint for teaching and learning.




I'm going to be adding more resources here but to start here's a PowerPoint presentation (Pedagogic PowerPoint) I've added to Slide Share. It's a great site that converts your presentations to a simple slide show.

It's potentially a much better way of making your PowerPoint presentations available to students than uploading it straight to the Blackboard.

Here's a nice blog post from Clive Shephard (Don't blame PowerPoint). Usefully, it summarises some of the research done into dual code theory. It doesn't mention Tufte though who does actually blame the software and its "cognitive style".

Some progress on the kitchen

Learning about feeds

Here's an extract from a blog post by Bill French (E-mail is where knowledge goes to die, April 22, 2003):

On a daily basis almost every knowledge-worker reads news and other sources of business content and then creates comments and observations that other business associates, colleagues, customers, and vendors consume. The usual and customary method for creating annotations and observations is by e-mail. (…) However, the place where e-mail content comes to rest is problematic - e-mail is where knowledge goes to die.

He makes a good case for blogs, arguing that they allow knowledge to be more easily shared and accessed. The context is business but it could easily be Higher Education.

In the spirit of enabling more convenient access to my blog, I've been having a go at setting up a feed so that users can subscribe to my blog (via email or a feed reader).

Let's hope it works ...

Coming back to feedback

Here's that quote I was looking for on feedback:

The indispensible conditions of improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is able to monitor continuously the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repetoire of alternative moves or strategies from which to draw at any given point.
(Sadler, 1989 p.121) [his italics]

I think what I like about it is the bit about understanding what's quality whilst doing the assessment, perhaps stressing the need for formative feedback whilst a work in progress.

Is this maybe why blogs and wikis have potential in HE?

References

Sadler, D.R. (1989). ‘Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems’. Instructional Science, 18, pp. 119-144

Beyond e-moderating

I've just finished doing a course called Beyond e-moderating and need to get together with two other colleagues who've also done it to see if it's worth running at our university.

There's an ambiguity to the title: beyond e-moderating in the sense of 1) more advanced/developed e-moderating or 2) there's more than just discussion boards now.

The course seems to want to keep both possibilities available in tension: more of the same (albeit extended and developed) for some people, other things (inc. blogs and wikis) for others.

On the recent course I was on, some participants expressed a scepticism of blogs and wikis (why though if they're already signed up to the value of online interaction through discussion boards?). Others, however, enjoyed engaging with other tools for online publication and collaboration.

I think it would be interesting to run the course internally but I think I'd like to see more on the use of blogs and wikis (possibly even something on synchronous working - virtual classroom or IM) in the context of the bigger picture of getting students to reflect, publish, give, receive and act on feedback, work together, generate and share ideas collaboratively etc..

I don't think that there's one right tool for all of these kinds of different but overlapping activities.

Not much progress on the kitchen

... so here's a picture of the skip outside our house instead.

Perhaps there's a danger that blogs could become skips for the dumping of all kinds of things?


I think I'm definitely carrying this blog/home improvement thing too far.