Wisconsin Union Blend

If you’ve been bit by the blog-reading bug, you know that you can very quickly fill up your RSS reader with way too many subscriptions. Fortunately, most of the time, you don’t have to read and respond to each and every post. It is easy enough to skim through collections of posts, looking for those that are most relevant. And of course, there is the wonderful “Mark all as Read” button, a feature in most RSS readers, which instantly relieves the guilt of falling 3 or 30 or 300 posts behind on your reading.

But what happens when blogging and commenting on other students blog posts, becomes a central part of a course? With 20 or more students each writing one or more posts a week, just keeping up with the blog can quickly become a significant part of the weekly workload - for both the students and the instructor. Can students and teachers get away with hitting the “Mark all as read” button?

This is one of the challenges that has come up in a class I’m helping out with this semester that has turned a long-standing paper portfolio project into an online portfolio incorporating both blog-like and wiki-like interaction. When asked to give feedback on the project, nearly all of the students wrote that they like how the online portfolio gives them the opportunity to post their ideas, reflect on their readings, and continue class discussions outside of class. There was wide-spread agreement that the portfolio was an integral and useful part of the class. But when asked what could be improved, several of the students mentioned having difficulty keeping up on what their peers are writing. A few said that it was hard to sift through the many posts to find those that are most relevant each week.

We initially thought that “tagging” would be a solution to the latter problem, but so far it seems that the students don’t really use the tags to navigate the site. We added a “Top Tags this Week” block to the main page, to help students keep track of the topics that are receiving the most attention in class. We also switched over to a short abstract for each post on the front page, so that students didn’t feel as if they have to read every word of every post. This helped a bit, but students still noted that they were sometimes overwhelmed by all of the posts. And so, we’ve come up with a dashboard view, that allows students to quickly choose what they want to read based on the authors and titles of each post.

In addition to improving the layout and design of the site, we’re also thinking about how to frame student expectations. One initial hope for this project was that it would take the individual and potentially lonely act of producing a portfolio and make it social and interactive. Students can click on the “My Contributions” page to see their own evolving portfolio, or they can dive into the river of news, or the tags, to explore the work of their peers. Unlike the paper-based portfolio project, we wanted students be able to benefit from and build upon the work of their peers. This is certainly happening - students are starting to reference each others posts, and are occasionally extending upon their peers’ post ideas and formats. But the process of selecting, reading, and reacting to the work of their peers remains challenging.

And so, I’m asking for your help. If you were tasked to create an introductory guide to course blogging, what advice would you give to help frame students expectations? How would you help them deal with the inevitably overwhelming flood of information? What other advice would you give to make sure students time and energy was put to best use in these environments?

I’ll put a few of my initial ideas into the comments, but I’m most looking forward to seeing what you have to say!

As I look at the many different features that one could include in his or her blog, I’m wondering what people’s thoughts are on what features are absolutely necessary to blogging.

There are some features which are a part of all blogs regardless of platform:

1. All blogs have an audience.
2. Posts are dated in reverse chronological order and can be linked to directly (permalink).
3. Posts are “labeled” or categorized with tags.
4. Posts are edited by none other than the author.
5. Posts are written in the first person, author chooses what to say.

Then there are many features of a blog which are debatable such as:

1. It has to have frequent updates.
2. It should have a feed.
3. The posts need to be brief.
4. It has to allow comments.
5. It has to incorporate external links.

I would argue that blogs should allow comments and incorporate external links because blogging, to me, means bringing in outside voices as a way of bouncing ideas off of people, getting feedback and rethinking your positions or making better arguments to support them. And one way of bringing in outside voices and supporting your positions is to link to other blogs or websites that do so.

Which features do you feel are necessary to blogs? Would you add others?

The Physics building here on campus has a room for the general public to peruse, do some experiments and learn a bit about the subject. There is an experiment that, to me, seems like how we learn about bloggers. It’s called ‘Particle Pinball.’ Here’s a photo of it.

There’s a three-sided, covered box at one end and a knob on top of the box that you turn. When you turn the knob, it changes the shape of the item inside of the box. You never see what the shape is.

At the other end of the experiment you have a rapid-fire, air gun that shoots small metal balls into the open side of box and you’re supposed to determine the shape of the item in the box by the way and angles that the metal balls bounce and ricochet back out of the box.

The same approach can be said for how we get to know people who blog.

Take the case of a law professor here on campus — Ann Althouse. Professor Althouse is a prominent blogger who has written and discussed blogging quite extensively on and off-campus. I didn’t know that or her at all when I began my search. I found her when I was researching blogs and saw her name in a Chronicle of Higher Education commentary that she had written on the perils of blogging in academia. So I thought, “Great, I’ll look at her blog and see what I can learn. Maybe I’ll go and talk with her.”

Fire one — I went to her blog — Althouse– and started looking at her posts. The first one read “Just got an iPhone, it seems pretty cool.” I thought, “So.” Then I saw that she had 32 comments on that post. That’s quite a few comments for a post that isn’t all that interesting. I mean, there’s no commentary on her part other than it seems cool. Then I started looking at her other posts and I saw that she was getting lots of comments on lots of other things she was blogging about. So I decided to check out her ranking through Technorati.

Fire two — Well, Prof. Althouse blogs quite a bit and about things that draw commentary. She writes about the law and politics — two subjects that are certain to get people talking. She had a very high ranking which means lots of people read her posts or link to her blog. But that didn’t interest me so much as the other information about her that I saw. I saw blogs that made references to her — some of them weren’t so nice. I also saw videos from YouTube that she was in. And I saw samples of her photography from her Flickr site.

Firing Away — In about an hour I had read many samples of her writing, read what others were writing about her, heard her voice, and learned that she likes to take pictures of flowers. Through her blog and its connectedness to other blogs via comments, links or trackbacks, I started to get a sense of not only her online presence, but also felt like I had developed an early opinion to the question of “Who is Ann Althouse?”

Prof. Althouse is a blogger who gets bombarded by her readers and their comments. She is bombarded by other bloggers who post about her or the things about which she writes. She’s bombarded by her willingness to put herself and her thoughts “out in the open.” And like the rapid-fire air gun game, all of this bombardment helped me to begin the process of defining the shape of Ann Althouse. You see which posts get the most attention and which comments ricochet off or bounce back to another blog. You get to hear her opinions and how other people interpret those opinions.

This dynamic is exciting and unnerving and it’s no wonder that Prof. Althouse says that she has learned to develop a thick skin. With all of this activity constantly swarming around her and testing her edges, she needs to have that resilience. Personally, it’s amazing to me that someone would choose to be so open about themselves with blogging. It seems to me that no matter how much we think we’re presenting ourselves in a reasonable or likable or innocent or totally obscure way, with all of the buzz in the blogosphere, who you are is always being scrutinized.

So far at Union Blend we’ve developed, or perhaps stumbled our way into, three general formats for our blog posts

• short tips like this one
• links to interesting online tools and resources (like this post on the RSS toolbox), and
• longer articles on things like the differences between wikis and blogs.

These are just three examples of the 7 basic posting formats listed by Amy Gahran on her excellent blog Contentious:

1. Link-only
2. Link blurb
3. Brief remark
4. List
5. Short article
6. Long article
7. Series postings

Wait a minute? Formats? Isn’t blogging supposed to be totally free-from?

Well, it can be, of course, but while we would never argue that you should develop and stick by blogging formats at the expense of creativity, thinking about post formats for your blog can be useful for you, your readers, and for your students if you’re introducing them to blogging.

For blog writers, having a few post formats at your disposal can help you set the scope of your post as you sit down to write. If your blog usually has a mix of short and long posts, for example, it is easier to break up a lengthy, difficult to write post into a series of shorter, more manageable ones. Developing a new format can also spark creativity. This was certainly true for me when Ron posted the first podcasting tip, because it helped me realize that we could use Union Blend to gradually develop a big library of little, but very useful instructional technology tips without trying to write them all down in one sitting.

For your readers, a set of post formats can help develop a set of expectations about your blog. Also, when tied to categories (or tags), post formats can be a great way to provide your readers with an organizational structure that makes your blog easy to navigate. And, at least one blogger has argued that breaking up the rhythm of your blog with a few different formats can make your blog a more interesting read.

For your students, developing, modeling, and perhaps explicitly discussing a few types of blogging formats will help your students understand what you’re hoping to find in their blog writing, and may make it easier for them to hop in and get started when faced with the big empty text box of their first blog post.

See also:

• Doug’s blogging links - a growing list of blogging resources.

Want to learn more about blogs? Use a wiki! Wikipedia has a nice bloglossary that can clarify the terminology that surrounds blogs and blogging.