Blogging as a Personal Learning Environment

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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5 responses to “Blogging as a Personal Learning Environment”

  1. Jackie Fitzgibbon Avatar
    Jackie Fitzgibbon

    Hi Mike, some interesting articles though I dont always understand the techy terms used. The blog by Jeff McClurken discussing how to archive blogs, tweets etc for future study was of interest to me. I would like to know what ideas they came up with. When doing my dissertation last year I referenced many speeches, press releases etc from websites but during the course of writing the piece some of these moved locations or disappeared which was very frustrating when I had to check over my footnotes and references.

  2. Harold Jarche Avatar

    Jackie, I would suggest that whenever you use a service on the Internet cloud, that is important to you, you should find out how best to back it up. Social bookmarking services like Delicious let you export an OPML file and on Twitter you can subscribe to a service like Tweetbackup.com

    Here’s more on my perspective about owning your data:

    http://www.jarche.com/2009/08/wheres-your-data/

  3. Ann Foley Avatar
    Ann Foley

    Hi Mike,
    Really enjoyed the class last week. Haven’t gotten round to fully doing the blog, feel a little odd writing about ‘me’ but I’m sure it will come eventually. What the class has given me though is some extra confidence to play around with the internet. I even discovered google library all by myself, great tool for keeping searches on books and such; highly recommend it. I suppose what I have discovered just after a short space of time, is that there is no need to keep a notebook beside at all times! Still nervous about all this modern technology but getting there slowly. It’s a learning curve.

  4. Gearóid Fitzgerald Avatar
    Gearóid Fitzgerald

    Hey Dr Cosgrave,

    Have looked at a couple of the blogs by Bill Turkle’s class…I looked the blog of the girl on whose blog you left a coment during class and one another. To be honest I didn’t take in much of the content of what they were actually writing, but I did notice how they had a few pictures in their blogs whereas I myself up to now do not. Furthermore, I saw how some words and phrases in their blogs in act turned out to be links when I clicked on them. I have only produced one of these so far and it links me up to Shane’s website. It was a practice.

    I think what Ann has said about how she feels can be applied to me too: nervous but getting there. Wonder whether the notes and my bibliography so far on Zotero are good enough. Thinking of approaching Evernote soon to put up a few pictures…scared of twitter and engaging with strangers on the internet – this is probably my greatest fear right now.

  5. Shane McAuliffe Avatar

    Great articles. Very useful. Must get round to responding to them via my own blog shortly. Been meaning to! Drowning in books at the moment! Ho hum.

    Useful article too Harold thanks for the link! Will be keeping an eye on your blog! 🙂

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