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!

Tucked away in the corner of a Thursday evening poster session was my pick for Educause 2007’s coolest session of the week, Lafayette College’s use of the content management system Drupal for:

two highly flexible and distinctly different online spaces: a departmental Web site full of easily edited and highly searchable documentation, current news, and dynamic RSS feeds, and a campus-wide community space where blogging, photo sharing, podcasting, and class discussions coexist.

Very cool! The poster, From Blogs to Brawn: Deploying Flexible Web Applications, was presented by Courtney Bentley, Instructional Technology Program Coordinator at Lafayette College.

The community space side of the equation, which Lafayette calls Soapbox 2.0, puts Drupal’s blogging, polling, and photosharing modules to work for students, faculty, and staff. Their use of the Organic Groups module makes it easy for any registered user to create a group, whether it be for a student initiated class study group, an instructor led class blog, a student sporting group, or an administrative unit looking for collaborative project space.

This flexible, user driven collaborative space is a great model to follow as we look to building our own collaborative spaces.

To get a sense of how it is working at Lafayette, be sure to check out their Hall of Fame page with stats on the Soapbox’s first year: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~soapbox/hof/

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Anybody use Pipes? Think about aggregating three or four RSS feeds into a single super feed.

Josh Baron at Marist College talked about how they manage the onslaught that is Web 2.0 technology. Through a programmatic approach Marist is putting pedagogy and faculty innovation right out front with these technologies. They manage a grant program wherein faculty come to Josh’s group with a technology and/or idea in mind. Through a consultation process, assistance with proposal development, and (as Josh put it) a bunch of us “freaks” sitting around a table and talking about it, the technology gets piloted for a semester.

The pilot/experimental nature of the program means that promises are not made to the faculty about the commitment to supporting the technology beyond the life of the pilot. If that technology is successful in meeting the goals of the instructor, and if excitement builds, then the technology might get folded into something more permanent or longer lasting.

Just in case you are wondering, Josh’s group does take all the security, FERPA and other support issues very seriously. They don’t accept technologies that don’t fit the mold of what they are trying to accomplish with the grant program. I have Josh’s card and some handouts from the session if anyone on the Madison campus is interested.

On his Learning and Innovation blog, Cole Camplese has put together a compelling picture of the growing campus Eco-System for Digital Expression at Penn State University. Camplese shows how academic blogging, podcasting, digital media creation, and other emerging communication and collaboration tools are made possible by a healthy mix of campus IT infrastructure, physical spaces on campus, support resources, and numerous opportunities for instructors, students, and support staff to get to together and talk about instructional technology.