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How you SHOULD use blogs in education

Posted in General, Blogging for Education on July 29th, 2005

Following on from how NOT to use blogs in education this post attempts to summarise this paper and add a few extra angles onto how you can use blogs effectively in education and invites your additional hints, tips, criticisms & wotnot.

You must incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course - This may sound obvious but simply providing blogs to learners and saying ‘Hey, use them however you want’ is an absolute guarantee of failure as all but 1 or 2 people will take you up on it. Significantly here that I’m not saying assessment… you can provide non-assessable but socially motivating tasks, as long as they form part of class activities (i.e. competition for best designed blog with each participant presenting for 3 minutes) but they don’t have to be parts of assessment, and talking of assessment…

You should use assessment tasks that incorporate subversion - One of the worst things you can do is mandate posting on particular topics with particularly rigid frequency… you’ll over-assess & kill off exactly what blogs are good for: personal expression & exploration. By all means say that you’re expecting a post a week… or ever more, but let people approach this in ways that fit them and set tasks that allow for deviation and subversion. Never, ever, mention number of words!

You should use blogs for what they are good for - Blogs are by no means the answer to everything, they are very strong alternative communication tools but if you want to build quizzes, run polls, have near-synchronous conversation, do listserv-y kind of discussion or strictly manage just about anything then you’ll probably want to look at another tool. Use blogs to assist people to publish work, represent themselves online, interact with their peers as part of an organic community and manage their own digital content and identity.

Use proven and effective blogging tools - When you decide to set off on your blogging journey don’t, please don’t, do it with some ‘tacked on solution’ to a large and established Learning Management System. Blogs are just as complex as any other form of software and you want to get the tools off people who know what they’re doing. You probably wouldn’t pick up an office suite from Macromedia, would you… Look at all the options and chose a proven path, there are lots of them.

How NOT to use blogs in education

Posted in General, Blogging for Education on July 27th, 2005

Update: You can now find part II, how you SHOULD use blogs in education, here.

I thought I’d summarise a paper (Blogs @ Anywhere: High fidelity online communication) that I’m hoping to have accepted for ASCILITE 2005 here in two posts offering quick summaries of how I think you should & shouldn’t try to use blogs in education. If you’re into depth then you might prefer the paper, otherwise read on:

Never never approach blogs as discussion boards, listservs or learning management systems: Almost invariably the first thing people do when encountering new technologies is to try and get it to do what the technologies they are used to do and this is no exception when it comes to blogs.

Group blogs are a bad idea and don’t work: Sure there’s a place for collaborative/ group blogs but that place is not in education. Blogs work well for individuals… they are tools of centred communication and pretty far removed from community management systems like Drupal. Just don’t go there!

Don’t try and force blogging into something else: Blogging suits highly customisable, individual, owned and fiercely flexible tools like WordPress. You can try and fit blogs into other systems such as Moodle, Drupal or Tiki but you’re not going to do well because the entire centralised philosophy of these systems is utterly opposed to that of successful blogging platforms

Ignore RSS at your peril: Probably the biggest mistake that adopters tend to make is to ignore RSS or just through it a casting glance. The problem is that these people aren’t bloggers and just don’t understand. Without RSS blogs would pretty much just be extensions of geocities pages. Your learners are NEVER going to surf each others sites everyday and the majority of them won’t even go to that funky web-based aggregator you set-up.

Any more really bad ideas you could add?

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Phaedrus Academy

on November 7, 2005 at 4:53 am Comments (2)

Action Research

In their chapter Sustainability of Researched-Based Practices, Vaugn, Klingner and Hughes (2004) highligted variations of sustainability as it relates to research based practices.

The first type is proactive sustainabilty. This is characterized by teachers using a practice much like it was taught to them. The teachers can articulate the theory behind the practice and thus tailor the practice to match the needs of their students.

The second is routine sustainability. In this example, teachers implement the practice in their everyday teaching routines. The practice maintains its validity because teachers use it in a similar manner in which they were taught.

Third is modified sustainability. In this case, teachers may modify a practice because they lack of understanding or because they are trying to improve the practice to match their students’ needs. However, in modifying the practice they may be comprimising its effectiveness as a research-based practice. “Teachers with modified sustainability believe they are still implementing the practice, but have just made a few changes’”.

If teachers consider their modification or creation “action research”, why not collect data related to its effectiveness? If data is not collected, how will teachers truly know that their students’ improvement is due to the modifications they made or created? Also, if their practice is truly beneficial to students, why not contribute to it becoming a researched based practice in which others can benefit?

Collecting data is not hard when you have a defined system. It may not be empirical research, but could fit into single subject research or case study.

I agree with Diann. Action research is good teaching, however I don’t believe you can add the “research” component enless it includes a process of evaluation. Again, how does a teacher know it is effective? A gut feelings is not enough. Teachers must look at student progress wholistically. What else in the students’ life may be contributing to their progress. Has their home environment improved? Has their medications changed? Are they receiving a related service that they had not received before? All of these can impact the progress of students. If teachers attribute student progress to an intervention minus all of these factors, is it really true? It may be…but I’d rather see their claims within a more wholistic context and with data to back it up.

I think personnel preparation programs need to improve their practice of preparing teachers to identify easy but effective ways to collect data in the classroom.

I think researched based practice and action research is cylclical. Each contributes to the other.

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Phaedrus Academy

on November 5, 2005 at 6:19 am Comments Off

Differentiation

“The first step in making differentiation work is the hardest. In fact,the same first step is required to make all teaching and learning effective: We have to know where we want to end up before we start out—and plan to get there.”

Carol Ann Tomlinson

This quote follows the path of our previous discussions around critical thinking, active learning and content vs. learning.

I believe we have agreed that students must actively find meaning in what is being taught.

In one of our article reviews, “How to Promote Critical Thinking”, Daithí Ó Murchú and Brent Muirhead asserted the premise that a, “wise teacher seeks to guide his/her students toward greater maturity which translates into new skills and knowledge.” Therefore, a “wise teacher” utilizes meaningful learning strategies. Meaningful learning requires learners to actively process their experiences and assign meaning according to thieir previous experience. As a result, learners must actively engage in new experiences beyond information aquisition. Learners must utilize critical thinking at all times through careful examination, astute perception, skillful interpretation, and practice.

Therefore differentiation requires teachers to be facilitators of critical thinking. They must identify the place they want the students to be at the end of instruction in order to guide them there. This is true for any level of learner.

http://www.learner.org/channel/workshops/socialstudies/pdf/session5/5.MappingARoute.pdf

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