I’m making my Digital History students (Hi6018) create and use a blog as the anchor for their assessment portfolio in the the course, and I was hunting around for other courses using blogs, but cannot find as many as I used to be able to see. Bill Turkel’s class at UWO are doing it, and are about three weeks ahead of mine, but many others have disappeared or closed off.
Since this is the first year of the MA class, and my students didn’t expect it coming in the door, I’ve not required them to make their blogs public, but I think we’ll persuade a few to emerge later in the term. As well as reading other student blogs, I’m going to make them look at some older courses in the field, like Jeff McClurken’s or T Mills Kelly’s . Interestingly, the latter now used a closed Zotero 2.0 group for reasons which make sense, and I might try his approach next year along with a public blog.
Hi6018 is different to these others because we have big chunk of census digtisation and of TEI, which we’ve been doing for over a decade, and this is the first year of explicitly teaching web 2.0 collaboration. I have put some links on Blackboard to some reflective blogging presentations, and I’m also making them read things like this overview or this piece by Harold Jarche which is all good for exposing them to new ideas, but especially useful on blogging in this short post.
I’m also thinking about the question of Personal Learning Environments because we have a staff seminar on this at lunchtime today. There is no one definition, but many ideas about what a PLE is, or might be. I’m increasing coming down to guiding my students towards using an “old-fashioned” reflective blog as their PLE, in which they use blog posts to journal their learning journey. I suppose, since PLEs are Personal, there is no one size fits all. The movement from top-down systems like Blackboard to PLEs is from college run systems to student centred environments, means there will never be any one size fits all tools in the PLE space. Next week, as well as teaching them how relational databases work, I might even fit in some in class discussion on this.
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